Michael M. Jordan
Hillsdale College 

Regional Meeting of the Philadelphia Society
New Orleans
September 21-22, 2001

            In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a host of progressive planners and reformers repeatedly urged the American South to join the rest of America in the March of Progress and National Consolidation.  I won’t talk about the biggest “urge,” back in 1861.  I’d like to focus on the urges after the War for Southern Independence.  After this war, the urges continued, often coming from Southerners themselves.  Let me briefly cite a few instances. 

Early in the 1880s New South advocate Walter Hines Page told Southerners that if they wished to bring progressive education, science, industry, and economic prosperity to the South, they must bury, permanently bury, “the Ghost of the Confederate dead, the Ghost of religious orthodoxy, and the Ghost of Negro domination.”  According to Page, the dead hand of the past was holding the South back, keeping the blessings of progress from the region.  In his commencement address at the State Normal School in Athens, Georgia, in 1901, Page asked his audience to recite in unison what amounted to a new religious creed:  “The more men we train, the more wealth everyone may create.  I believe in the perpetual regeneration of society, in the immortality of democracy, and in growth everlasting.”   In his famous 1886 “New South” speech, Henry Grady repudiated the Southern past as well, declaring that education, science, and industrialism would be the salvation of the New South.  As Lewis P. Simpson has observed, New South advocates like Grady believed in a new “sacred trinity”: Education, Science, and Industrialism (The Dispossessed Garden 82).  Salvation will come from this secular god, not from a gracious, loving, and righteous Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. 

Many Southerners in the 1930s heeded the siren’s call for pleasure, profit, novelty, and efficiency.  Donald Davidson complained that the materialistic spirit of the New South persuaded some Southerners to use as their “mirror of well-being the front page of the newspaper, or the society page, or the stock market quotations”  (Southern Writers 2).   What Mark Twain said of two drummer scoundrels in Life on the Mississippi illustrates the New South mammon worship: “the dollar their god, how to get it their religion.” 

            Though many Southerners ignored their past and embraced the New South Gospel of Profit and Progress, some took a stand against progressivism.  The Southern Agrarians are perhaps the most famous 20^th century opponents of American progressivism and defenders of traditional Southern customs, ideas, and values.  Allen Tate helped the fledgling Agrarians to put calls for progressivism in perspective in one of his 1927 letters to Donald Davidson, three years before the Agrarians published I’ll Take My Stand.  This is Tate to Davidson:   “I think the test of the True Southern Spirit would be something like this: whenever the demagogues cry ‘Nous allons! [Let’s go forward] if the reply is ‘Non, Nous retardons! [No! We’ll stay behind]  then you may be sure that the reply indicates the right values” (TLC 191).  When the demagogues urge us to go forward, to join the March of Progress, Tate insists that the True Southerner will stay where he is, or even look backward.  

The Agrarians were not the only twentieth-century Southerners to resist “Progress” and National Consolidation.  They influenced others: Richard Weaver, M. E. Bradford, and Flannery O’Connor, to name only three of many.   Flannery O’Connor speaks for True Southern folk in comments she made in 1957 about changes in her region.  Speaking for herself and other Southern writers, she said: “The anguish that most of us have observed for some time now has been caused not by the fact that the South is alienated from the rest of the country, but by the fact that it is not alienated enough, that every day we are getting more and more like the rest of the country, that we are being forced out not only of our many sins, but of our few virtues” (MaM 29).  She also said it was difficult “to reconcile the South’s instinct to preserve her identity with her equal instinct to fall eager victim to every poisonous breath from Hollywood or Madison Avenue” (MaM 200).  

            The New South’s continuing attack on old Southern ways has at least two common themes: admonitions to forget the past and to put money in thy purse.  Some change the tune a bit, saying, remember the injustice of slavery and put money in our purse by supporting affirmative action and reparations.   While many Southerners oppose Leviathan’s liberal social engineering, they are nevertheless the new provincials Allan Tate identified over fifty years ago: They have lost their “origins in the past and its continuity into the present, and begin every day as if there had been no yesterday.”    Increasingly all of life seems to be measured by economic and materialistic yardsticks, for the South no less than for other regions of the United States.  To quote Allan Tate once again, “All are born Yankees of the race of men/ And this, too, now the country of the damned” (87).  In contrast to the True Southern spirit, a Yankee of the race of men will sacrifice his loyalty to family, to kin, to place, to community, to heritage--he will sacrifice his birthright and his piety toward God and the creation—all for a mess of progress. 

            But is the True Southern spirit dead?  Is the True Southern Spirit of resistance to Progress and National Consolidation (and now global consolidation)—is it a Lost Cause, just as lost as the War for Southern Independence one hundred and forty years ago?  What does the South have to teach us?  It teaches us the wisdom and hope that T. S. Eliot expresses so well in his Choruses for The Rock and in his essays: there are no Lost Causes because there are no Gained Causes.  Let me quote Eliot on this point: “If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.  We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph” (Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot 199-200).  

            Leviathan is a mighty enemy.  Cultural amnesia and mammon worship are mighty enemies as well.  The world, the flesh, and the devil are not new temptations, though they may dress up in a different fashion today than in years past.   The conflict between the Old South and the New South is still with us.  The Southern Tradition is still at bay.  We may hope that some of our past is decently buried: the ghost of Negro domination, for instance.  But we should not forget the past, beginning every day as if there had been no yesterday.    We should not bury religious orthodoxy, and the morality that goes with it.  With Stark Young and the Agrarians, we should “defend certain qualities not because they belong to the South, but because the South belongs to them.”  The True Southern Spirit will not embrace the religion of progress and the philosophy of materialism.  It will find its identity in something more substantial: in a heroic and tragic past; in spiritual convictions appropriate for this life and eternity. 

With these remarks as preface, let’s turn to our panelists.   I expect they will tell us more about both the True Southern Spirit and Yankees of the race of men.

Ted Smith received his Ph.D. in Communication from Michigan State University.  Since 1987 he has been teaching in Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Mass Communications.  He has commented on journalism and public policy in numerous broadcast talks for CBS, NBC, CNN, C-SPAN, NPR, and other news programs.  He has also published widely in trade journals and in major newspapers and magazines such as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, and Harpers.  His major recent publications included two edited works on Richard Weaver: Steps Toward Restoration: The Consequences of Richard Weaver’s Ideas and In Defense of Tradition: Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver—these fine books published by ISI and Liberty Press.  Many of us are eagerly awaiting his biography of Richard Weaver, to be published next year by University of Missouri Press. 

Mark R. Winchell received his Ph.D from Vanderbilt University and has been teaching at Clemson University since 1985.  His publications include books on Joan Didion, William F. Buckley, Leslie Fiedler, Eugene Talmadge, Cleanth Brooks, and Donald Davidson.  I especially recommend his books on Brooks and Davidson. Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism won the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies award for its outstanding contribution to literary criticism.  Where No Flag Flies: Donald Davidson and the Southern Resistance will likely be the definitive biography of the most stalwart of the Agrarians.  Anyone who has or wants to understand the True Southern spirit will want to read this book.  Dr. Winchell writes for a host of university quarterlies and conservative magazines of scholarship and opinion.