I’ve been thinking about Keith’s most recent post on the “Southern Fantastic”—the common and consistent mythification of the American South in film. Keith offers lots of good cinematic examples, and I think it’s pretty obvious that his points can be extended. It’s not only in film, but throughout a broad American popular culture that the South conjures up mystical tropes in place of concrete realities. In the movies, music, and literature of the twentieth century, it seems nearly impossible to tell hard truths, to explore the complex and seemingly paradoxical facts about southern life, culture, politics, and people. The South takes on its mythical mysticism not just in commercial culture, but in popular memory.
Some of this, I suspect, has to do with the ways “the South” seems to be simultaneously inside and outside “mainstream” America—how the South represents both a foreign, or at least distinct, type of American society and culture while simultaneously being a kind of fundamental center of the U.S. Sarah Palin might have been thinking of “the West” when she labeled some regions “real America,” but her distinction resounded throughout the South. (Maybe she meant the South, I have no idea how Palin divvies up and categorizes.) The South’s inside/outside position, its idiosyncracity/mainstream-ness, has grown from a unique history, one that began soon after the Civil War when (northern) American politicians struggled to reconstruct a broken nation and defeated southerners attempted to rebuild their own self image.
It is a trope among historians that “the North won the war, but the South won its memory.” Nonetheless, this insight is very true in as much as we can paint history in such broad strokes. As Stephanie McCurry notes (around the 20:30 mark), in world history, it is extremely rare for losers of war to retain their power, their culture, and their ability to interpret and circulate their version of the war they lost. “So where else other than the United States,” McCurry asks, “did the defeated retain such power, not just to keep alive their version of the war, but to commercially peddle it?” In the American Civil War, the obliterated and intellectually-disgraced Confederacy continued to influence America’s political and civil society, the victors of the war’s own memory of the conflict, and the cultural apparatuses that allowed for the losers’ memories to thrive for generations.
Part of this came about due to President Andrew Johnson’s decision not to prosecute and punish confederate leaders; Johnson allowed a relatively easy return to the Union. Part of this conundrum also has to do with the fact that most northern soldiers and war boosters did not fight the war to end slavery, and that they too were nervous about the freeing of four millions African American slaves. Northern racial bias helped speed up the South’s return to the United States and augmented the notion that the war was a tragic misunderstanding, a war of “brother against brother” that could have been avoided if only bureaucrats and politicians could have gotten their act together. In this way, most white Americans came to agree with the southern interpretation that the war was a “Lost Cause,” a mistake—equally felt in the North and South—of hot tempers rather than disagreement about the expansion of racial slavery. For those of you in Madison, take a minute to ride your bike through Camp Randall; you’ll notice plaques, canons, and that little prison cabin. But you’ll see zero mention of slavery or even the phrase “civil war.”
Yet, there was another set of processes that fueled the South’s increasing resonance as the mythic center of America: the so-called closing of the West. As I don’t need to tell this blog’s readers, Fred Jack Turner announced the closing of the western frontier in 1890 and, while the immediate effects (both real and imagined) of the 1890 census have often been exaggerated, there remain many indications that Americans at the time feared a national stagnation and a loss of the robust individualism that they a) felt they needed to define themselves as Americans and b) had been ubiquitously and continuously symbolized by westward expansion. No matter who you were or where you came from, mythic mystical notions of “the West” promised, you could move west and begin anew. The West—and its mythical corollary, manifest destiny—worked as a fundamental building block to the American psyche since Americans began thinking of themselves as Americans. With the open western ranges “gone” or “closed” (metaphoric stretches in the 1890s to be sure), American myth-makers needed new tropes. The American South became a stand-in for much of what Americans feared they had lost with the closing of the West. The American South became, symbolically, quintessential America, even as it continued to lay somewhat outside “mainstream” American norms. This transition from the West to the South paralleled the growth of nationalizing popular culture industries and southern music rise into American popular music: gospel, country, blues, jazz, R&B and rock’n’roll all came (in popular memory at least) from the South.
This wide pan angle on Keith’s question, What is it about the South?, may have veered away from popular culture (and toward an, admittedly, generalized historical narrative), but I do think the relationship of the South and West creates interesting connections, especially when thinking about commercial culture and popular memory. I’d be curious what some of y’all think, especially specialists in southern and western history. (See that? No one’s a “northern historian”—it’s the South, West, and Midwest (the former “West”) that get their own regional labels in the academy.)
