J. Strom Thurmond died on June 27, answering that last great Roll Call in the Sky at the age of 100, shortly after finishing out a half-century in the U.S. Senate. He won his first election before Bill Clinton and Junior Bush were born. He spent the last period of his life in his native...
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Redeeming the Time The Days are Evil
The human universe, we are told by optimists on the editorial pages, is contracting into a gray and insipid doughball, pasted over with brightly colored labels advertising the only ethnic rivalries that persist: the struggles between Nissan and Daimler, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. Unfortunately, there are people around the world who do not read...
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The GOP Flop
As the Republican primaries drew to a finish last spring, the several pundits whom the Grand Old Party carries in its pockets began to sing the praises of the man who was emerging as the winner. Partisans of his rivals—Steve Forbes, Lamar Alexander, Phil Gramm, and others—started lining up to kiss hands and bend knees...
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Hollywood Blues
“A fact is not a truth until you love it.” —Shelby Foote A while back, I wrote a piece for a Festschrift in honor of Walter Sullivan—Place in American Fiction: Excursions and Explorations. My piece, “Places We Have Come From, Places We Have Been,” argued that my own fiction and poetry, like that of so many...
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Talkin’ Freedom Blues
I was sitting here listening to the University of North Carolina’s student radio station play “Hotrod to Hell,” a cut from Elvis Hitler’s new album Disgraceland (you think I could make that up?), and somehow the time seemed right for another round-up of Southern news that they’ve probably been keeping from you. Speaking of the...
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Race Politics, Part Two—Clinton for President, Petty for King
Welcome to Darlington. The cradle of Southern stock car racing. The sport was born near here the first time a U.S. Revenue agent figured that he could catch a moonshiner running along a twisty hack road with a car load of booze. No way. . . . Darlington is tradition. First of the big tracks...
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The Electoral College: Rooted in Racism?
Prof. Akhil Amar of Yale Law School launched a salvo against the Electoral College. In a piece published on December 12 at the website of Time, Amar claimed that the Electoral College has pro-slavery origins. James Madison preferred it to a nationwide popular vote because he wanted Southern slaves to count in the tally of...
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Societas Regained: Agrarianism, Faith, and Moral Action
Allen Tate’s “Remarks on the Southern Religion” (his contribution to I’ll Take My Stand) was a plea for the recovery of a humane social order. Nourished by daily labors in the fields, the agrarian community not only produced a more stable and wholesome environment for families and workers than industrialism could offer, but an agrarian...
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The Cause of Us All
Mark Winchell explores the myth of Abraham Lincoln's "deification" in American culture, among other Southern themes.
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A Mind of the South
February 10 was the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Mind of the South, WJ. Cash’s classic and, in the event, only book. Reading Cash was a formative experience for most members of the symposium-going class of Southerners, so there will be a number of gatherings to mark the occasion. As a matter of...
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Powder Puffs & Loose Peanuts
“It is a hard task to treat what is common in a way of your own.” -Horace Jill McCorkle: The Cheer Leader; Algonquin Books; Chapel Hill, NC; $15.95. Jill McCorkle: July 7th; Algonquin Books; Chapel Hill, NC; $17.95. Louis Rubin is easily the most respected and celebrated scholar of modern Southern literature, but it will never be said...
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Bye-Bye, “Y’all”
The term "y'all" is being appropriated for woke means in a manner that would make historic Southerners turn in their graves.
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On Reconstructing the South
While there is much to praise in Michael Hill’s “The South and the New Reconstruction” (March 1997), there is a streak of unreality and wishfulness in the article which begs attention. For example, what would the Southern League have us do with the masses of Northerners—a/k/a Yankees—who inhabit the region? Or, for another twist, what...
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Did You Ever . . . ?
The past few years have not been good ones for Southern comedians (some of our politicians aside). First we lost the Reverend Grady Nutt, whose gentle Baptist humor was one of the high spots of the syndicated television program Hee Haw. Southern Baptist preachers drink a lot of iced tea in the line of duty:...
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Songs of the South
I like that old-time rock and roll. I’m sure nostalgia has a lot to do with it: the older I get the better the 50’s look. But there’s more to it than that. I like what the music says about America, and especially about the South. Let me explain. Some time ago, a geographer at...
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Tell About the South
Why a monthly letter from the South in a national (indeed, international) publication like this one? A good question that deserves a thoughtful answer. When Thoreau heard about the construction of a telegraph from Maine to Texas, it’s said, he asked whether Maine and Texas had anything to say to one another. He meant, of...
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With Malice Toward Many: Washington, Lincoln, and God
Most Americans in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries believed in the public expression of religious sentiments as surely as they believed in publicly proclaiming their patriotism. Such expression was not merely their right; it was their duty. Indeed, religious faith was part of the “given” of any political debate, the common ground upon...
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Dixie Choppers
The Confederate flag, which had been in a place of honor (though not sovereignty) above the South Carolina capitol for almost 40 years, was removed in the stealth of the night of June 30/July 1. The removal was made possible because all but a handful of Republicans in the legislature, who had pledged not to...
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Stepping Backward
When Jefferson Davis was a boy, he told his father that he did not wish to go to school. The Yankee schoolmaster, although a kindly man, demanded a great deal of memory work and threatened to punish young Jeff for his failure. His father took the declaration in stride and calmly explained to his son,...
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Remembering Eugene Genovese
Eugene Genovese was one of the most influential and controversial historians of his generation. Whether Genovese ever self-identified as a conservative remains an intriguing question, without a simple answer. Few people knew him better than I did. In his teens, Genovese, the son of a Brooklyn dockworker, had joined the Communist Party USA. It eventually...
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Spying on the American Remnant
As a boy, your author lived in a working-class neighborhood just outside Houston’s city limits. My parents were the children of rural people who had come to Houston looking for work during the Great Depression. They lived in frame houses sitting on cinder blocks in Houston’s West End, a community of people Larry McMurtry called...
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The Reinvention of Reconstruction
American conservatives have rightly viewed the post-Civil War Reconstruction period as a tragic era rife with corruption, scandal, mismanagement, and unconstitutional uses of power at both the state and federal level. Unfortunately, many have also been deceived by a leftist narrative of Reconstruction as a flawed but ultimately virtuous project, and this has distorted their...
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Charmless
Early in Owen Wister’s 1905 novel Lady Baltimore, the narrator, recently arrived in Charleston from Philadelphia, remarks upon the stillness of the city, its “silent verandas” and cloistered gardens behind their wrought iron gates—“this little city of oblivion . . . with its lavender and pressed shut memories . . . ” For Wister the...
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Who ‘Fought to Preserve Slavery’?
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac The campaign against memorials to long-dead Confederates seems to have taken a bit of a sabbatical. Perhaps the media have only paused the hype in favor the celebrity groping mania, or maybe pulling down or defacing outdoor art is not a cold-weather activity. In any case, the relative calm was a blessing...
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A Week of Mondays
“There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson What helps set this study apart is its still largely verboten subject. Joseph Scotchie devotes his attention to that part of the American right that Lee Edwards, Jonathan M. Schoenwald, and William Rusher...
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The American “Collective” (Day)Dream
“Some races increase, others are reduced, and in a short while the generations of living creatures are changed and like runners relay the torch of life.” —Lucretius Reading student applications for scholarships, as I have done on and off now for a dozen years on the undergraduate scholarships committee of the University of California, Davis,...
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Still Storied
As traditional as a Chinese restaurant, as homegrown as a Subaru, as agrarian as a fax machine, as Celtic as a computer, as handcrafted as cable television, as hospitable as an eight-lane expressway, as Baptist as a drug deal, as Presbyterian as neo-pagan worship, as Episcopalian as a lesbian sermonette, and as pious as an...
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Southern Supplements
“We have sung of the soldiers and sailors, but who shall hymn the politicians?” —Herman Melville The great classicist and poet A.E. Housman once wrote that the work of a scholar in the humanities is not like that of a scientist examining specimens under a microscope—it is more like the work of a dog searching...
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The Southern Tradition and the Black Experience
I am, to say the least, honored to receive your Richard Weaver Award and to be invited to share some thoughts with you tonight. Richard Weaver observed, in Ideas Have Consequences: “There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot. . . . For four centuries every man has been not...
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Motel California
Folks keep asking me when I’m going to write about California. (They generally lick their chops when they ask it. They seem to think I’m going to trash the place. I wonder why?) Anyway, yeah, it’s true that I’ve been living in the Golden State for several months now, and I haven’t said much about...
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The Virginian
To be published by a university press, one must demonstrate originality of scholarship. In a forgetful age, that is not hard to do. It is easier still when a constant rewriting of history is required to meet the ever-changing dictates of empire. This latest biography of Edgar Allan Poe promises to emphasize “as never before”...
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As American as a Stolen Election
U.S. presidential elections are routinely contested for a reason: Cheating has been a recurring part of the American electoral process.
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The Whippoorwill
“The pure products of America go crazy.” —William Carlos Williams The go-to-hell attitude, unique features, and deceptive talent by which we know Robert Mitchum (1917-1997) were the product of his heredity and experience. His father was a Scotch-Irish South Carolinian with some Amerindian blood—he died young in a railroad accident. His...
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Citizen Faulkner
If we wish to understand and profit from a great artist, the essential thing to grasp is his vision, as unfolded in his work. Much less important is something that, unlike the God-given vision, he shares with all of us—his opinions. Still, the opinions of a creative writer with the societal breadth and historical depth...
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The Cult of Dr. King
The third annual observance of the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. passed happily enough in the nation’s capital, with the local merchants unloading their assorted junk into the hands of an eager public. It is hardly surprising that “King Day,” observed as a federal legal public holiday since 1986, has already become part of...
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Some Place in Time
“Rural areas are shrinking, accents are becoming less distinct, and Southerners are being tamed,” writes Pete Daniels of the changes which have transformed the agrarian nation of Davis and Lee into the modern South. Daniels may have his feet planted firmly in earthy Southern history, but there has not been a concerted demand by creationists...
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American Historians and Their History
This article is drawn from the author’s speech on accepting The Rockford Institute’s first John Randolph Award at the historic Menger Hotel in San Antonio, a short distance from the Alamo. For this occasion, I have been asked to reflect on “the historian’s task” and “the American republican tradition.” To do so could be a...
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GOP Country: A Troubled Marriage
Back in February, music historian J. Lester Feder published an article in the American Prospect entitled “When Country Went Right.” As Feder would have it, country music wasn’t always as “conservative” as it is today. Once upon a time, it seems, country music was a left-leaning, “populist” American art form. Then Richard Nixon, taking his...
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Men of Parts
That most aristocratic of literary roles, the career as man of letters, has proved especially congenial to the Southern intellectual in the 20th century. The title of one of these two volumes—A Southern Renascence Man—describes the role: the writer as a Renaissance man, a man of parts, a complete personality grounded in and developed out...
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A Southern Legacy
In all Eastern Orthodox Churches, this troparion or prayer is spoken or sung frequently in worship: “O Lord, save Thy people and bless Thine inheritance. Grant victories to the Orthodox Christians over their adversaries; and by virtue of Thy Cross, preserve Thy habitation.” This ancient prayer was, one might say, a “national anthem” that was...
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Bubba-cue Judgment Day
Did you notice last spring how the national media-the New York Times, Newsweek, NPR, all of them-almost simultaneously began talking about “the Bubba vote”? I seriously doubt that many of these folks have actually met Bubba, much less discussed politics with him, but at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Contest they sure could...
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The New America
Yeah, I know we’ve got two Southerners running on the Democratic ticket. Don’t rub it in, OK? As Miss Scarlett used to say, I’ll think about it tomorrow. Let’s talk about sports. As you probably know, in four years jocks and TV cameramen from around the world will converge on Dixie for the next Olympic...
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This and That From Here and There
It’s been a while since my last roundup of regional news, so some of these items have a little age on them, but you probably missed them anyway, so they’ll be news to you, right? An implicit theme (not implicit now that I’ve mentioned it, I guess) is that Southern culture is still kicking, even...
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A Beautiful Friendship
The story of their first meeting has been told so many times that it has become part of the folklore of modern Southern literature. One day, during the fall of 1924, Robert Penn Warren stopped by Kissam Hall on the Vanderbilt campus to visit his friend and classmate Saville Clark. With Clark was his new...
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Agrarianism From Hesiod to Bradford
What does it mean to be an “agrarian”? In reading Southern literary journals, I get the impression that the “agrarians” were an isolated group of writers who, nostalgic for the preindustrial South, celebrated in prose and verse the bygone beauties of rustic life. In this sense, they were like the early Romantics, and their movement,...
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The Character of Stonewall Jackson
“Look, men, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer! Follow me!” —General Bernard E. Bee, C.F.A., shortly before falling, mortally wounded, in First Manassas The era of the War for Southern Independence illuminates the present time for what it is,...
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What the Thunder Said
“The earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods.” —Numbers 16:32 The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 convinced Voltaire (who didn’t need convincing to begin with) of the nonexistence of God. The Great California Earthquake, when it comes (as it must),...
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A Dike To Fence Out the Flood
When in September of 1787 the new instrument of government proposed by the Great Convention went out from Philadelphia to be received and considered by the several commonwealths connected through the old Articles of Confederation, those fraternally affiliated societies saw the document delivered to them through the Continental Congress according to their own needs and...
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Erasing Mason-Dixon
The South has an enduring status as a region somewhat separate from the main thrust of American life. The tension between agrarian and commercial impulses in American society, epitomized by the yeomen idealized in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and the striving industrial class whose rise was promoted by Alexander Hamilton’s Reports as Secretary...
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Cabbages and Worms
Umberto Bossi does not like journalists. His stock epithet for the gentlemen of the press—applied to them almost as regularly as “swift-footed” precedes Achilles—is vermi (worms), although he sometimes falls back on servi sciochi (idiot servants). Not too long ago, at a Lega Nord meeting, Bossi caught sight of the press corps covering the event...