That Tragic Land
The Burden of Southern History.
by C. Vann Woodward.
Louisiana State University Press. 205 pp. $3.50.
The Confederacy.
by Charles P. Roland.
University of Chicago Press. 218 pp. $3.95.
C. Vann Woodward is a distinguished member of that group of Southern scholars who have in recent years attempted to destroy persistent and pernicious myths about their section’s history. In his biography of Tom Watson (1938), Professor Woodward exposed the ugliness of racist politics; in Origins of the New South and Reunion and Reaction (1951) he showed that it was economic advantage and not a desire to “rescue” their fellow whites which motivated the Redeemers of 1877; and in The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) he demonstrated that segregation was not an ancient Southern tradition but a result of conservative resistance to Populism in the late 1890’s. As recently as last June, Mr. Woodward returned to his native Arkansas to assail another myth, the New South idea that industrialism will automatically solve the South’s social problems. An industrialism based on unchanged social and political habits, he told his audience, “means caste and segregation and paternalism . . . juleps for the few and pellagra for the crew. It means a facade of greek columns and a backyard full of slums . . . a New South fraud papered over an Old South myth.”
In the present collection of eight essays written during the 1950’s Professor Wood-ward once again searches for the true meaning of Southernism. He rejects the legends of the Cavalier and the Plantation as having been disproved by historical analysis. He rejects the idea that climate is a central factor on the ground that the South is changing rapidly while the climate remains the same. He rejects the nostalgic agrarianism of the authors of I’ll Take My Stand as being outmoded by the Bulldozer Revolution, and he also rejects the genteel racism of U. B. Phillips (“the South shall be and remain a white man’s country”) as a position increasingly impossible to defend. Instead he finds the central theme of Southern history—the factor which still sets the section apart—in a knowledge of tragedy, “the experience of frustration, failure, and defeat” not shared by the rest of America.
The idea is an attractive one, and it is expounded throughout the book with a love of the South tempered by intelligence and detachment. Essays on John Brown, on the significance of Reconstruction, and on Populism as a heritage which we “cannot afford to repudiate” exemplify Mr. Woodward’s determination to uncover the tragic meaning of these episodes without flattering the self-righteousness of either North or South. According to his thesis, the South can provide us with “a heritage and a dimension of historical experience that America very much needs, a heritage that is far more closely in line with the common lot of mankind than the national legends of opulence and success and innocence. . . . It is a heritage that should prove of enduring worth to [the Southerner] as well as to his country.”
This sense of a special destiny, this affectionate fingering of old wounds, has a natural appeal to literate and liberal Southerners frustrated and sometimes driven from home by the Eastlands, Ellenders, Pattersons, and Jimmy Davises. And surely there must be something worth preserving in a society that for more than thirty years has produced many, if not most, of our very finest imaginative writers and historians. Moreover, as Professor Woodward points out, racism, self-glorification, and intolerance have generally been national, and not merely Southern, sins. The nation’s current racial troubles spring from the fact that the North never insisted on and the South consequently never accepted the commitment to equality implied by the Emancipation Proclamation: “America reneged, shrugged off the obligation, and all but forgot it for nearly a century.” (My own students, at a university thirty miles from the Canadian border, hotly denounce segregation without seeming to consider why there are no Negroes in their suburbs, schools, or public swimming places.)
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The time has come, however, when the idea of the Southern sense of tragedy must give way before a few simple facts of Southern existence—facts that put someone like Professor Woodward into an extremely painful relation with his heritage. For in their battle against desegregation Southern politicians are repeating all the old errors of the 1850’s and the 1890’s, and Southern liberals have had to fall silent or go down to defeat or exile. To speak relevantly of tragedy and defeat in America today must be to speak of a different tragedy and defeat, one that continues to deform the life of every tenth American and every fourth Southerner.
Unlike Professor Woodward, the impoverished Southern white has reacted to his predicament, not with a heightened insight into human destiny, but with Negrophobia and anti-Semitism. And the South’s much touted decline in political power since the seven decades when slaveowners dominated the government is after all only a relative one: a tight little oligarchy remains in control back home, with Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson, and a score of committee chairmen in Congress wielding a rather more than fair share of Southern power in Washington.
The years that have passed since Professor Woodward’s call for the South to accept the consequences of Appomattox and to “perform what is required of it with forbearance and humility” have made it increasingly clear that the South is not going to do any such thing. Less than one Negro in three is registered to vote in ten Southern states; in Alabama the figure is one in eight, and in Mississippi one in twenty. Seven years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina still have no desegregated schools; Louisiana has four Negro children in two desegregated New Orleans schools; and the remaining states of the old Confederacy have less than one Negro child in fifty attending classes with whites. The occasional flare-ups of violence, of snarling vituperation against the “Jew-backed NAACP,” of police attacks upon Negroes with clubs and dogs, are only symptoms of a deeper malaise, a refusal to accept criticism and change that is ominously reminiscent of ante-bellum days.
Professor Woodward tells us that, “In 1897, the Charleston News and Courier, which calls itself the oldest paper in the South, voiced strong opposition to a proposed Jim Crow law for trains. ‘Our opinion is that we have no more need for a Jim Crow system this year than we had last year, and a great deal less than we had twenty and thirty years ago.’” That same newspaper now prints front-page editorials in defense of segregation headlined “Who Cares What Asians Think?”
In the meanwhile, the state that has produced such able and deeply moral men as Professor Woodward, Harry Ashmore, and John W. Fulbright (the first two now living outside the state, and the Senator apparently headed for retirement in 1962) is largely being represented to America and the world by Orval J. Faubus.
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Professor Roland, like Professor Woodward, is a liberal Southerner who is not blind to his section’s faults. His history of the Confederacy, a volume in the Chicago History of American Civilization series, is free from the retrospective patriotism and denigration of the Negro that mark E. Merton Coulter’s earlier book on the same subject. Mr. Roland gives sensible, conventional answers to such much-disputed questions as the reason for the South’s defeat: “With all else equal the Confederacy lacked the physical assets for a successful war of independence.” He handles military matters with commendable brevity, and manages, in 195 pages, to include excellent short discussions of Confederate finance, politics, diplomacy, religion, education, and even fiction, poetry, and music. His book can be recommended as the best available introduction to the subject with which it deals. His discussion of the death from wounds and disease of 250,000 Confederate soldiers, one out of every four men enrolled, and his account of “indescribable suffering” behind the lines are useful correctives to the habit of many Centennial celebrants of regarding the War as simply a vast and enjoyable kind of game.
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