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Time Essay: THE SOUTH TOMMOROW

8 minute read
C. Vann Woodward

The predictions for the South of 1990 indicate growth at a breakneck speed: a 22% increase in population, v. 15% for the nation as a whole; a 38% increase in jobs, largely in manufacturing, v. 28% for the nation; a 55% increase in per capita income, v. 48% nationally. To place these immense changes in perspective, TIME asked the author of the classic work, The Burden of Southern History, to share his insights on the changing identity of his native region, and six other eminent Southerners for their brief personal visions of what lies ahead.

A question raised up North a few years ago went like this: “Will the South become more like the rest of the country or will the rest Southernized?” The question then applied to but one issue: civil rights and Governor George Wallace’s appeal in the North. But it awakened many echoes, for it is an old question that has been raised before in various forms.

In recent years history has been returning perversely ambiguous answers: yes, the South has become more like the rest of the nation in some ways; but, yes, the rest of the country has been in some measure Southernized. The response of the South to being Northernized has been divided or resistant; that of the North to being Southernized has been more forthrightly negative. On both sides the conviction persists today that the South is different, and the differences are significant.

For more than three generations after the Civil War, the balance of trade in cultural influences went heavily against the South. The North was the exporter, the South the importer and consumer of ideas, styles, literature and fashions. Southerners compliantly pursued Yankee values, imitated Yankee models and tried to believe in Progress. They even ruthlessly suppressed Southern Populism, a movement that offered the only radical critique of corporate capitalism and dominant Northern values then viable in America. But Southerners were never converted into authentic Yankees; they proved to be dutiful consumers but poor imitators.

Eventually, the intersectional balance began to shift in favor of the South. The tipping point came in the Great Depression production. The first sign of the change was a renaissance in Southern literature. A brilliant group of Southern poets, novelists and playwrights threw off the bonds of imitation and poured out works of power and innovative genius that were overwhelmingly Southern in subject matter as well as style. For the mass market, cruder Southern products flooded the land: hillbilly music, gospel music, the Grand Ole Opry.

But none of this compares in sheer impact and shock power with the South’s mass export of human beings. Beginning earlier and accelerating during World War II, for more than two decades they moved north and west by the millions, black and white. The blacks constituted the vast majority, the greatest ethnic migration in American history. And they were Southern, too, perhaps the most quintessentially Southern of all. The North was confronted by a Southern invasion vaster by far than any General Lee ever mounted.

The new immigrants crowded into the cities with numbers and suddenness comparable to previous immigrant waves of Irish, Italians or Jews, and this time old settlers tended to leave the cities rather than move over. Northerners’ schools, housing, courts, police, prisons, all were affected. Worse still, their own people were responding with “Southern” bigotry and bias. Northern cities burst into flame in the 1960s with insurrectionary violence surpassing any in the South. A Southerner swept presidential primaries with racist slogans in Northern states. Even Northern politics was being Southernized.

Resentment over all this revived the old stereotypes about the South: slavery, secession, peonage, segregation, lynching, Kluxery, violence, brutality, injustice and racism. These perceptions lowered the threshold of permissiveness for defamation of Southern whites. “Rednecks,” “crackers” and “yahoos” were the milder epithets used with impunity. The South was the “Fort Knox of bigotry,” a citadel of nativism, xenophobia, chauvinism, militarism, red-baiting fundamentalism and reaction.

During the civil rights movement, Southern whites had done much to justify defamatory stereotypes. Incidentally, that movement was not, as many assumed, an invention of Northern liberals. It was made in the South, the activist part, by Southern blacks and mainly fought out on native soil. White opposition from the time of massive resistance, the Citizens Councils and hard-core segregation, on through Little Rock, the battle of Oxford, the Birmingham bombings and the Selma march, had released some of the ugliest passions and brutality of the old racism—all spectacularly publicized by press and screen.

By the early ’70s, passions had cooled on the racial front in the South. New accommodations rapidly developed. Some of this was surface cordiality, but improvements in the way ordinary people behaved to each other were undeniable and quite real. It was Northern schools that now had the most extreme segregation and displayed the most extreme reactions against integration. A new type of Southern patriot took delight in pointing a finger at Boston, that oldest moral critic and accuser of the South.

These developments helped to modify the old stereotypes and mitigate fear of Southernization in the North. The old grounds for Northern moral superiority gave way with the realization that racism could be as bad and violence worse in the North. Self-righteousness withered along the Massachusetts-Michigan axis. Northern morale was further lowered by Viet Nam and Watergate, devastating blows at the widely held myths of invincibility, success and innocence. Those myths were never shared by the South anyway. In their present state of disenchantment and demoralization, Northerners are apprehensively looking south for leadership. Much they see is in their imaginations, but not all.

With the defensive isolation of the past behind it, the South of the future should be better prepared for a role of leadership and, for good or ill, more in step with the rest of the country. But there will be Southerners who resist an “Americanization” composed of the shabbier values of other regions that already disfigure the landscape. It will be suggested that other regions might profitably undergo selective Southernization. Some would call it Southern counterculture.

What about the mad pace of Southern economic growth, the heedless sprawl of cities, the frantic industrialization, in short, the Bulldozer Revolution? It has come on the South with a swiftness that is without precedent and with an irresistible momentum. Will it not end by leveling all the old regional distinctiveness and completing the homogenization by duplicating in the South what people are fleeing in the North? Aren’t cities the same everywhere and isn’t one airport or supermarket indistinguishable from another? What distinctiveness is left?

Economic growth there is, and more there will be. But to take exception to the title of a Flannery O’Connor book, it does not follow that Everything That Rises Must Converge. For one thing, the South has not risen that much. For another, it had a long way to go to catch up, and it is still far behind. Sunbelt opulence still leaves the South much the poorest of the country’s regions. The old Southern distinction of being a people of poverty among a people of plenty lingers on. There is little prospect of closing the gap overnight.

Even if the South does catch up, economic convergence will not mean convergence in all things. Only the most vulgar economic determinist would argue so. Much of the old distinctiveness will be retained. Some of it, to be sure, is not readily quantifiable. That would include much of the old courtesy, the antique personalism, the familial ambience, the love of place, the abhorrence of abstraction, the fear of being computerized.

All these “downhome” ways represent the instincts of black Southerners as well as white. They are part and parcel of a common regional subculture that was hammered out between the two oldest, largest and most distinctive American minorities of all, the white Southerners and the Afro-Americans, during the centuries of their Southern experience. As a result, black Southerners will be a conspicuous part of any impact the South is likely to make on national affairs.

Today the incubus of the regional inferiority complex is lifting from the back of the Southerner. It had been there so long that apology for being a Southerner had become almost a regional personality trait, a distinctive manner of speech, of gesture, a habit of mind. Now a new personality is emerging, and a welcome change it is if it can retain the humility without the inferiority.

During the past 200 years, the base of regional dominance has shifted from time to time. It was lodged longest north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi. For nearly a century after the Civil War, the Northeast governed the country, furnished nearly all the Presidents and, for much of the period, presided over a built-in empire, the South and West, its annexed territories. That period may have ended.

For 32 of the first 36 years of the republic, the South held the presidency and the predominance of power. It managed to govern the country with some distinction in spite of the burden of slavery on its back and one hand tied behind, the black hand. With the burden removed, with both hands free, it might do even better should its chance come again.

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