(Lifting the Veil of Ignorance, monument to Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee University. Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)
Tuskegee, Alabama
The contemporary language of racial justice tends to focus on external threats to human dignity rather than on what individuals and groups do for themselves to maintain or rebuild a sense of self worth against the odds. The two narratives are not mutually exclusive, of course. But nor are they of equal power. While some forms of justice can be achieved by confronting those who’ve trampled on your rights, individual dignity and self worth can never be granted by a third party. They can only be developed internally, usually through a combination of strong will and hard work.
Yet because of the emphasis on the wound over the healing, minority progress is too often discussed exclusively in terms of the need for recognition from white society or redress from the government. Particularly since the 1960s, minority protest has eclipsed capacity building in the eyes of the intellectual elite. That’s likely because “the experience of rights-assertion,” as critical race theorist Patricia Williams has written, can give individuals the feeling “of empowerment of an internal and very personal sort,” tantamount even to the “process of finding the self.”
While not insignificant, validation only goes far. And it still places the power to validate in the hands of a third party. At the very least, it requires a straw man against whom to define oneself.
Sometimes, the exclusive focus on protest and validation evades the question of rights or even and formulating solutions to any given problem. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, for instance, activists focused on mounting a racial validation campaign rather than directly addressing specific ways to curb police abuse. Almost 3 years later, it’s unclear what that campaign achieved substantively.
It is this narrow focus on protest–whether for rights or validation–that has led to the sidelining of one of the great men of American history, Booker T. Washington.
Washington, who was born into slavery in 1856, founded a teachers college in Tuskegee, Alabama, on July 4, 1881, under a charter granted by the state’s legislature. What started as the Tuskegee Institute grew to become Tuskegee University. The initial emphasis of the institute was to provide students with both academic and vocational training. Its first students built the school’s buildings, grew its food, and generally provided for most of the student body’s necessities. Implicit in these duties was Washington’s belief in the necessity of focusing on the moral, economic and educational development of African Americans. The larger goal was to have Tuskegee-trained teachers take this ethos of self-reliance communities across the South.
Given this extraordinary achievement– a 25-year-old, late-19th century black man building a school of higher learning even during the worst years of racial terror–one would think Washington would be a well revered figure in U.S. history.
Instead, over the course of more than a century, Washington has become a controversial figure, sometimes viciously characterized as the embodiment of “Uncle Tomism,” i.e., being subservient to whites. What earned him that derogatory epithet? He chose the path of self-improvement over protest.
In order to build the Tuskegee Institute, Washington had to appeal to sympathetic whites who had money and power. He found allies –and donors– in men such as Andrew Carnegie and J. Pierpont Morgan, and was consulted by several U.S. presidents. (In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington to dinner at the White House.)
Given his familiarity with this milieu, it isn’t surprising that Washington was fluent in the language of the marketplace rather than that of morality or justice. Nor is it shocking that Washington thought that integrating blacks into America’s growing industrial economy was the path to betterment—and better treatment—for African Americans.
In his infamous 1895 speech at an economic expo of Southern states held in Atlanta, Georgia, Washington clearly laid out his philosophy to his audience of white businessmen. He emphasized the importance of hard work and steady economic advancement for African Americans. He argued that rather than flee the South or put their hope in politics, blacks should “cast down their buckets” and find work in “agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions.” “The wisest among my race,” he insisted, “understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.” Emphasizing the need for African Americans to contribute to the regional economy, he said that, “[n]o race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges.”
At the same time, however, he asked whites to also “cast down their buckets” with black workers rather than hire immigrants, not as an act of charity but as one that furthered their own self-interest. As African Americans made up one third of the region’s population, he argued, “no enterprise seeking the material, civil or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success.” Conversely, if they did not choose blacks to help themselves, it would be to everyone’s detriment. “We shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South,” he warned, “or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.” Washington believed that only through economic achievement, which required cooperating with those who had the power to hire, could blacks ever achieve political and social equality.
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At first, Washington’s speech was enthusiastically received by both whites and blacks. It was only as the violence and indignities of the Jim Crow era multiplied did he begin to receive criticism from a small cadre of Northern black intellectuals. In the decade after the speech, which his critics dubbed the “Atlanta Compromise,” most southern states disenfranchised black voters and formally established segregation. White racial violence was epidemic. It was then that his critics began to see Washington’s conciliatory Southern strategy as nothing less than cowardice. “Among his black critics,” writes historian Robert J. Norrell, “each denial of a constitutional right, every indignity against a black railroad patron, and every lynching became a mark against Washington’s leadership.”
It wasn’t until the mid-20th century, when activists began to demand more revolutionary change, that Washington would fully become a convenient antihero who symbolized the failed strategies of gradualism and accommodationism.
But I see no reason why an undoubtedly great man has to symbolize all things to all people. Minority advancement requires more than one strategy, and the ideology of hard work and protest are not mutually exclusive.
It’s entirely understandable why 1960s militants saw rights as being more important than interracial cooperation and economic advancement. But almost 70 years after the dawning of the civil rights era, might it not be time to remind ourselves of the ultimate source of dignity? Rights are critical, as even Washington conceded, but has our near obsession with them allowed us to devalue the need to teach future generations about the importance of developing their own skills and inner fortitude?
Booker T. Washington insisted that, “[n]o race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.”
Surely such wise counsel can benefit any young person of any background at any time.
(Denmark Vesey Memorial, Hampton Park, Charleston, SC. Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)
Charleston, South Carolina
My first stop in Charleston was to pay my respects to Denmark Vesey—a formerly enslaved carpenter who had bought his own freedom in 1799 with the winnings from a lucky lottery ticket. He was hanged in 1822—along with 34 other accused men—for his role in planning a revolt that prosecutors claimed was to involved the raping of white women and the execution of white enslavers. Though it never came to pass, the plot haunted slave holders for decades.
Americans talk way too much about hatred—or love—when discussing the history of this country’s race relations. However, fear and greed have always been more critical determinants of how whites have treated blacks throughout U.S history. Greed is what created slavery and subsequent forms of economic subordination. Then came the fear. Whites feared the wrath of those they subordinated. The extent of their fear was often determined by demographics. During and after slavery, regions with black majorities—like the Mississippi Delta—were generally the places where whites were most fearful of black revolt, which therefore justified—in their minds—the more brutal treatment of African Americans.
Charleston, the capital of American slavery, was another such place. From the early 18th to the mid-19th-century, African Americans made up the majority of Charleston residents. The social hierarchy was pyramid-shaped with a thin layer of high-living whites at the top, a free black community in the middle, and a broad base of enslaved blacks at the base.
Those facts alone help explain the hysteria that whipped through Charleston when Vesey’s rebellion was revealed. It also sheds light on white South Carolinians’ hysterical response to John Brown’s raid and why the Palmetto State was the first state to secede after Abraham Lincoln was elected.
But there was something more intimate occurring beneath the numbers. Slaveholding was so widespread in Charleston by the mid-19th century that 3 out of 4 white households owned at least one slave. That meant, as historians Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts elegantly put it, “that most white residents interacted on a daily basis with someone who had every reason to despise them or even wish them dead.”
Vesey was a sixty-year-old carpenter when he was executed for plotting an insurrection. News of the foiled plot led whites to tighten slave supervision and further limit whatever meager liberties free blacks had enjoyed. In short: Subordination led to anger, which led to fear, which led to insurrection, which led to fear, and even more cruel subordination, which led to fear.
According to one contemporary observer, after Vesey’s execution Charleston “seemed to be in a permanent state of siege.” Less than forty years later, the start of the Civil War further heightened fears of slave insurrections.
But there’s a wrinkle in this story. In 2020, historian Michael P. Johnson, a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, published a paper questioning whether the insurrection wasn’t a fantasy concocted by Charleston’s ambitious mayor, who became quite the hero for conducting what Johnson calls ‘the deadliest civilian judicial proceedings in American history.”
Whatever the truth, it wouldn’t have been the first or last time whites projected their own sins onto African Americans and conjured up hypothetical black revenge to justify the further tightening of their control.
Erected in 2014, the statue of Vesey, which was vandalized in 2021, now stands in the middle of a park named after a Confederate general.
The Abbey of Gethsemani, Trappist, Kentucky (Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)
Trappist, Kentucky
Someone had placed a chair next to Thomas Merton’s grave, but I would have felt way too presumptuous to sit on it. (No, no, I didn’t want to talk to him. I just wanted to quickly come by and say thanks.) Also, I felt guilty only acknowledging the celebrated writer in a graveyard full of Trappist monks. Merton himself felt conflicted and embarrassed by his fame. He longed to transcend any craving for it.
Not so long ago, when I had zero money to my name, I bought a used copy of A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from his Journals. The book became a talisman for me, a lifeline. I have begun many days reading snippets of his words to help me focus on the things that matter.
So, yes, I am grateful to Merton and to his spiritual genius, but for the reasons mentioned, I rushed through the cemetery as if through a duty free store at an airport. I did, however, manage to snap the above photo.
The other day, I stumbled across an interesting essay in Christianity Todayabout what the collapse of membership in evangelical churches might mean for politics in the American South. The upshot was that it might not mean as much you’d think. But what was most interesting in the analysis was how the author, Daniel K. Williams, an historian who studies the intersection of religion and politics, challenged the prevailing notion that secularization—or, more accurately, dechurching—transforms people into hyper-rational high modernists. Sure, there are a fair number of intellectual types who reject the religion they’d formerly practiced and become strict devotees of the Enlightenment, but most people who become alienated from their faiths generally don’t reinvent their world views from top to bottom.
I usually cringe when I read anything about religion in the non-religious American press. More often than not, journalists treat faith as if it were first and foremost a set of “beliefs,” not appreciating that the average church goer generally isn’t willing to throw down over the fine points of theology and dogma. When citizens of modern liberal democracies choose to worship in formal religious venues, it’s because it provides them with a source of solace and wisdom when confronting the trials and tribulations of life and helps orient them toward answers to the most difficult questions, particularly those surrounding death and the hell that is other people. Of course, the fine points of theology–and liturgy–are not insignificant. They’re what make someone feel part of one denomination as opposed to another. But sociologically and politically speaking, what’s most important in any religion is the Weltanschauung, the comprehensive conception of the world and the place of humans with in it, that it provides followers. Any given theology serves to undergird this overall understanding of the world, notions about the meaning of life and what attitudes and behaviors best help you survive it. This general “moral orientation,” as Williams calls it, can live on even after people leave their churches, “even if it survives only in a distorted form.”
This explains why the political views of lapsed Catholics in the Northeast are still generally liberal. They still retain the “theology of communal beliefs” of the Church they left behind. In the same way, Williams argues, lapsed Southern evangelicals are not likely to suddenly become political liberals but instead will retain the “individualistic moralism” that defines–and even predates–evangelicalism in the South.
At this point, then, we’re not talking about articulated beliefs in the supernatural but more implicit assumptions about the nature of reality. An unchurched American who was raised by Baptists from Oklahoma is likely to have different assumptions about what humans owe one another or how they should generally behave than does a child of lapsed Catholics–or even mainline Protestants–from Texas. The worldview that may have once been instilled by religion becomes a more secular lens through which an individual views his fellow humans.
After mining survey data to compare the political views of churched and unchurched evangelicals, Williams hits pay dirt. The biggest contrast between the two groups came in the “area of personal trust in other people.” When asked, “Do you think most people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance or would they try to be fair?” 54% of white Protestant Southerners who attended church no more than once a year said that most people would try to take advantage of them. The response to the same question by Southern Protestants who attend church every week was almost the opposite. Fully 62% percent said that most people would “try to be fair” and not take advantage of them.
Similarly, when asked “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful or that they are mostly just looking out for themselves?”, 58% of the once-a-year church goers chose the cynical answer. Again, the responses of weekly church goers were almost the opposite. 57% said that most of the time people “try to be helpful.” Stripped of any religiously inspired notions of divine or human grace, unchurched evangelicals were left with what Williams calls “a deeply suspicious individualism.”
This makes me wonder whether West Coast-variety secular progressivism—with its decidedly elevated focus on racial and gender discrimination—also elicits a similar kind of mistrust in people. Neo-Civil Rights social campaigns highlighting the need to take care when conducting cross-racial or cross-gender relationships can certainly make people properly conscientious about how they treat others who are unlike them. However, it’s conceivable that they can also instill mistrust. Particularly in an era in which minorities and women are encouraged to complain about any real or perceived mistreatment, I wonder if such a social climate could also make people more likely to assume—to paraphrase the aforementioned survey question—that most people unlike them would try to take advantage of them rather than be fair. It reminds me of the scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen’s character calls a television executive an antisemite because, Allen insists, the exec asked him, “Jew eat lunch?” rather than “Did you eat lunch?” Allen’s character’s paranoia, of course, has clear historical origins. And the scene is poignant in addition to being funny, because even if this executive wasn’t an antisemite, it doesn’t mean that others might not be. And when do you trust people and when is it right to assume the worst? In any case, it’s fair to ask whether secular progressivism is spreading a “deeply suspicious communalism,” not entirely unlike the cynicism Williams found metastasizing in the South.
***
I’ve been reading a lot about the ideological mishmash that animated America’s founders, namely liberalism, republicanism, and the brand of Christianity and Deism that were clearly part of the mix. Despite historians’ best efforts to cast the American Revolution as some sort of intellectually-driven movement, there was not a single ideological through line that united the patriots or the framers. The Constitutional Convention itself was more a series of hard-won compromises over competing interests than it was some sort of intellectual debate about what constituted the best form of government.
I love that the delegates are called Framers. I realize it’s because they framed—or shaped—the Constitution, but what fascinates me is how much the Constitution itself was a frame to a nation that had not yet been born in any substantive sense. Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a member of the Continental Congress, called the Constitution a “new roof” that unified citizens of diverse and divided states. It’s significant that he saw it as a roof rather than a foundation. Nonetheless, that roof, according to the late Princeton historian John M. Murrin, “an ingenious contrivance” that gave a fragile, embryonic American national identity, a generation or two for interstate economic links to begin to tie together a real national community.
More than a half century later, Abraham Lincoln characterized the Constitution, which was a largely amoral set of procedural rules, as a picture frame designed to enhance the beauty of a work of art. Lincoln believed that the Declaration of Independence, which stated that all men are created equal, was the “primary cause of our great prosperity.” It was the “great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest.” As such, the Constitution could only be understood in tandem with the Declaration. Borrowing the biblical image of a “apple of a gold in a silver picture,” he compared the Constitution to “the picture of silver, subsequently framed around” the Declaration. “The picture,” he wrote, “was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—the apple not for the picture.”
Of course, the Declaration of Independence was a piece of war propaganda written to justify an act of secession and garner both domestic and international support. But that’s another story altogether. The point here is that the brilliant men who created the Constitution created a federal government but not a nation or a shared culture, which had to emerge through ongoing cooperation and conflict among the country’s inhabitants themselves.
I say inhabitants, because citizenship—along with its attendant rights—was defined legally and did not include all inhabitants. We all know the great trope of American civic life, that the Revolution is a work in progress, that the circle of citizenship widens through struggle over time. But citizenship is not the same as culture, and sharing a sense of national fate is not the same as sharing a worldview about the meaning and purpose of life.
That’s one of the many weaknesses of the current focus on social inclusion. Not only does it assume that there is a single culture into which everyone wants to be included, but that that single culture has already been pre-made by someone else before you were invited to participate. At the very least, you’d think that in the name of democracy, all Americans should be encouraged to inquire what exactly they’re being asked to include themselves in and whether there’s an escape hatch. Or at least an edit button.
More than 230 years after the Constitution was ratified, America still hasn’t congealed into a single culture. And while that fact can, at times, be a recipe for friction—political and otherwise—it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, if you really believe in diversity, as so many Americans claim to these days, you should really hope that the inhabitants of this enormous nation never allow themselves to be compelled to living in one single homogeneous culture. It seems to me that the only way to lower the unhealthy levels of social mistrust in contemporary America is not to try to shove everybody into one box, but in learning to accept that some people will never see the world like you do.
Two weeks ago in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a 40-year-old African American woman–I’ll call her Cheryl–told me how lucky she felt to have given birth to three girls. Boys, she said matter of factly, were so much more likely to be murdered.
East Baton Rouge Parish has never been a peaceful place. But this year, its homicide rate has reached the highest in parish history. As of December 6, 2021, there have been 157 homicides, up 29 from about the same time the year before. This year, like all others, most of the victims are black. Most of those are male. And the likelihood of the killers meeting justice, whatever that means, is slim. That’s because the friends and families of many victims would rather take matters into their own hands than appeal to the authorities. Fearing becoming targets themselves, witnesses often don’t tell police what they’ve seen.
Cheryl herself has witnessed a deadly gunfight outside her home. She didn’t contact the police. She knew the murdered man as well as the murderer. She also knew that the latter had seen her watching.
It’s not that Cheryl wouldn’t want to have the legal system hold murderers accountable. She fully understands the ongoing cycle. She has also felt the pain of losing a close loved one to homicide. Not long ago, her boyfriend’s son who was 16 and whom she had helped raise, was gunned down on the street. When I asked her if she knew anyone else who’d been murdered, she paused, then estimated that she’s lost around twenty friends to homicide since middle school. “I’ve been to a lot of funerals,” she said.
Still, Cheryl doesn’t give in to despair. Crime, of all kinds, is a constant. You deal with it. You have to be careful. When she saw how stunned I was by the number of friends she’s lost, she bucked me up playfully, telling me that I’d be alright.
Is she—and all those who have lost loved ones—to gun homicide considered a victim in America? Not really. What about all those who’ve lost their lives? Are they considered victims who deserved protection? Perhaps by gun control activists, but not by the public at large. It’s a tragedy, to be sure. But it’s one most Americans seem willing to live with.
***
The afternoon of the day I met Cheryl, I hopped in my rental car and drove west for an hour to Lafayette, Louisiana, to visit some sights. My first stop was the lovely century-old Romanesque Revival Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. I walked around the back and found the most beautiful cemetery. I wandered around for a while, and as I was leaving, I was struck by the sight of a tombstone symbolically laid in honor to all “victims of abortion.” I can’t recall having seen any other symbolic gravesites for any other groups there. All other tombstones had been set to designate where individual local Catholic residents had been buried. On my drive back to Baton Rouge, I took a detour through Iberville Parish, where I came upon a tiny, unremarkable little village. What was remarkable about it was a home-made anti-abortion lawn sign I passed on the main road into town. On the front it read: Joe Biden-Democrats party have blood on thier (sic) hands. On the backside it read simply: Trump 2024.
There’s been a lot written over the past decade on the growing role of victimhood in American life and politics. We generally understand how groups that successfully claim victim status can garner not only special legal protections but also a certain level of political power. That power derives from the ability to claim innocence, which is a precious currency in America. Still, little if anything, has been written on the political significance of championing third-party groups of victims. It stands to reason, however, that if innocence is the currency groups gain through victimhood, victims’ allies can attain a modicum of innocence themselves.
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It’s been almost 70 years since Reinhold Niebuhr published “The Irony of American History,” in which he warned a newly anointed global power that it can no longer afford to see itself as innocent. It’s not easy, he wrote, “for an adolescent nation, with illusions of childlike innocency to come to terms with the responsibilities and hazards of global politics in an atomic age.” Last year on Inauguration Day, we heard a captivating 22-year-old poet tell citizens of a nation that stockpiles as many as 4,000 nuclear warheads that “If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.” Not only is innocence as prized as it ever was in American culture, it’s apparently up to average citizens to uphold an imperial nation’s virtue.
But not all Americans can claim the same levels of virtue though. White people are generally granted the presumption of innocence more than those who are not white. (This might explain why it’s harder for the most beleaguered citizens of Baton Rouge to successfully claim righteous victimhood.) White Northerners can more easily claim virtue than their Southern brethren. That’s been true since the Civil War and was only reinforced during the civil rights struggles a century later.
In 1961, the 100th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, Tennessee-born writer Robert Penn Warren published an essay in which he detailed the “maiming liabilities” Americans had inherited from the conflict. While Southerners turned their historic loss into an excuse for their social failings, Northerners wallowed in what he called their “Treasury of Virtue.” They carry in their pockets, he wrote, “a plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future, freely given by the hand of history.” The North’s virtue, of course, was largely derived from its relationship to the victims of slavery.
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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, anti-abortion sentiment was much stronger in the Northeast than it was in the South. While legislators in Maine and Connecticut were passing abortion bans, North Carolina and Georgia were allowing for limited legal access to the procedure. A 1970 survey of Southern Baptist pastors found that 70 percent supported access to abortion when it benefitted the mother’s physical or mental health, 64 percent in cases of fetal deformity, and 71 percent in cases of rape.
The rise of the new Christian Right in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a reflection of the South’s growing demographic dynamism and economic strength. The region’s population was growing and becoming more urban. The upwardly mobile helped finance the building of large modern churches whose pastors preached traditionalism yet employed all means of modern communication. Evangelicals then realized that they had the financial and political power to shift the course of national politics. The rapid expansion of the Sunbelt strengthened their movement. Their emergence as power brokers, however, didn’t mean they stopped seeing themselves as targets of northern condescension. In 1976, Southern Baptist Convention president James Sullivan proclaimed defensively that “A world had thought we were an ignorant, barefooted, one-gallused lot was jarred out of its seat when it found out that . . . our voluntary gifts in a year are approximately $1.5 billion, and that on an average Sunday our churches baptize as many people as were baptized at Pentecost.”
What this suggests is that the subsequent politicization of evangelicalism and the emergence of the Christian Right cannot be understood outside of its Southern context. When figures like Jerry Falwell, Sr., and Pat Robertson spoke of reclaiming America, they were also eager to vindicate the South. A redeemed South would redeem the nation. Not only was the region no longer poor and uneducated, but it would also no longer allow itself to be seen as less virtuous than the North. It wasn’t until 1979, the year Falwell founded the Moral Majority, that evangelical leaders began to focus on abortion as their primary political issue. It was in the subsequent decades that the South became the epicenter of anti-abortion activism.
Over the last several decades, religious conservatives have successfully adopted liberal political strategies—from developing rights-based legal arguments to Saul Alinsky-style organizing. They’ve also learned the power of victim politics. As liberals have continued to identify new victim groups in need of government protection, Christian conservatives in the South have intensified their commitment to their chosen victim group: unborn babies. There’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of their activism, but the redemption they seek is not only in the eyes of God, but also in those of their fellow Americans.
David NeSmith, a 61-year-old self-described “Southern boy” and volunteer docent at the Jefferson Davis Memorial Historic Site in Irwinville, Georgia, told me that he doesn’t believe in hyphenated identities. “I don’t like it when people call themselves Irish-Americans or African-Americans,” he said. “We should all just be Americans.”
Without skipping a beat and with no hint of irony, NeSmith then began to wax poetic about his passion for “holding on to our Southern heritage.” He is particularly proud of a red baseball cap he owns that reads “American by Birth, Southern by the Grace of God.” And then there’s the fact that he and his wife Janice are active volunteers at a county-funded historic site dedicated to the memory of the capture of the president of the Confederate States of America by federal troops.
Most Americans think the Civil War ended on April 9, 1865 at the courthouse in Appomattox, Virginia, when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union Army commander Ulysses S. Grant. But the real ending to the brutal sectional conflict came a month later on May 10, when two Union Army regiments tracked down an unrepentant and delusional Jefferson Davis, who was headed to Texas—with his family and a dwindling coterie in tow—in the hopes of retaking up arms.
Davis was captured in a pre-dawn raid near a creek by a hillside covered with tall yellow pine trees in Southern Georgia, roughly 85 miles from the Florida border. Two Union soldiers wound up dead from friendly fire, but once surrounded, Davis’ posse didn’t discharge a single shot. Perhaps the most salient and dramatic aspect of the capture, though, was the unfounded rumor that surfaced afterward: that Davis had been caught in women’s clothes. Northern cartoonists had a field day. A Harper’s Weekly illustration pictured Davis in a hoop skirt and bonnet, carrying a hatbox labeled “C. S.” for Confederate States.
For all the ink spilled about the American Civil War over the past six generations, too little has focused on the psychic toll of defeat, including the attendant fears of the loss of manhood that bedevil the losers of any armed conflict. After the war, Southern whites found themselves disconsolate and disoriented. Not only did they have to grieve the loss of loved ones; they were also forced to contend with the humiliating everyday realities brought on by profound economic, political, and social change. Post-war consolation came in the form of remembering the dead, making sense of defeat, and reconstituting their identities.
I came to Irwinville because I wanted to ponder the loss that lies at the core of Southern white identity. Defeat is a subject that Americans, who fancy themselves a nation of winners, don’t like to grapple with. But it’s impossible to understand the South without understanding both the pain of historic loss as well as the fear of more loss to come. To reach the Jefferson Davis Historic Memorial Site I drove 120 miles on a raw autumn morning along the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway from the Alabama border through peanut farms, cotton fields, and pecan orchards, before taking a left on Jeff Davis Park Drive 13 miles east of Interstate 75.
The story goes that after witnessing Davis’ arrest, the landowner vowed to place the grounds permanently in the “hands of the Southern people.” I was the sole guest on the Friday afternoon I visited. The ranger was taking care of some business upstate in Athens and had left David and Janice NeSmith in charge. A sign on the front door notified visitors that the site would close early that day in advance of a high school football state championship game between the Clinch County Panthers and the Irwin County Indians in nearby Ocilla.
The monument itself—a bronze bust of Davis atop an uninspired granite shaft placed on the exact spot of his capture—left me cold. But the NeSmiths welcomed me warmly and were happy to chat about high school football, their upcoming 43rd wedding anniversary, the hazards of driving on red dirt roads in the rain, and the curious mix of insecurity, grievance, and resistance that whites from here call Southern pride.
***
Confederate soldiers who marched off to war in 1861 weren’t moved to action by deep loyalty to a brand new nation. Rather, it was their attachment to their individual states and local communities that sent them into battle. As historian W.J. Cash wrote in The Mind of the Southin 1941, “the armies had brought men together from four quarters, molding them to a common purpose for four years, teaching them more and more to say and think the same things, giving them common memories—memories transcending all that had gone before and sealed with the great seal of pain and hunger and sweat—binding man more closely to man, class more closely to class.” It was only after the war that the concept of the South took hold and the idea of Southern pride blossomed, and nobody remembered that they had initially gone to fight for Alabama or Virginia or South Carolina.
Because Southern identity emerged from the Civil War, the memory of the Confederacy remained essential, particularly initially, to its survival. “The Lost Cause” was the name given to the interpretation of the war that sprung from writings and activities that perpetuated that memory. In hindsight, the war took on a nobility and aura of glory it never had in real life.
The Confederate memorial movement—first at gravesites and then later in public squares—was the most broad-based cultural expression of the Lost Cause. For a half-century throughout the South, communities erected monuments that not only helped them make sense of the past, but established a forward-thinking Southern mythology based on the belief that their honor would be vindicated.
On April 6, 1910, the town of Monticello in central Georgia unveiled a 32-foot stone obelisk flanked by two Confederate soldiers, one a fresh-faced young private, the other an officer with a Van Dyke beard. Today, the monument’s two plaques are virtually incomprehensible—if not a little crazy sounding. On the monument’s south side, the inscription reads: “Crowns of roses fade. Crowns of thorns endure. Cavalries of crucifixions take deepest hold of humanity. The triumphs of might are transient. They pass and are forgotten. The sufferings of right are graven deepest on the chronicle of nations.”
On the north side of the plaque is inscribed a more prosaic but no less illuminating message: “To the Confederate soldiers of Jasper County, the record of whose sublime self-sacrifice and undying devotion to duty, in the service of their country, is the proud heritage of a loyal posterity. ‘In legend and lay, our heroes in gray, will forever live over again for us.’” I’m sure I’m not the only unsuspecting visitor who immediately wondered what “country” the inscription was referring to. I was so befuddled that I took a photo of the plaque with my phone and immediately sent it to a historian friend. Not only was he not certain of the answer, but he told me to Google the name Enoch M. Banks, a search that revealed the story of a poor academic at the University of Florida who was fired from his job in 1911 for arguing that the South “was relatively in the wrong” in the secession crisis. I left Monticello more confused than when I had arrived.
Believe it or not, the answer to the question at hand goes a long way in explaining why proud Southerner David NeSmith doesn’t see the irony in his complaining about hyphenated Americans.
From the beginning of their rebellion, leaders of the Confederacy compared their struggle to the American fight against British tyranny. Jefferson Davis insisted that the South’s withdrawal from the Union wasn’t a rejection as much as a recommitment to the principles upon which the United States was founded. As historian Reid Mitchell has argued, the Confederates “regarded themselves as the true Americans.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, once the war was over, white Southerners found it relatively easy to reconcile their Confederate and American identities. It turns out that a nationalism put together on the fly can be relatively easily dismantled. Plenty of bitterness did remain, however. It was directed not at the United States, but against the North, which many Southerners believed had usurped the national government and wielded its power to humiliate them. Defeat had left white Southerners with something of a collective chip on their shoulders.
As such, subsequent generations were more than eager to prove their honor and valor to their condescending Yankee brethren. The Spanish-American War provided the first significant opportunity in 1898. With the nation caught up in a wave of patriotism, Southern soldiers thought it acceptable again to don the blue uniform. The Atlanta Constitution reported that former Confederate soldiers were “profoundly loyal to the Stars and Stripes and are eager to exhibit their fidelity upon the field of battle.” The many veterans who were too old to fight encouraged young men to enlist. By the end of the conflict, Southerners had proven their loyalty to the Union while celebrating the memory of the Confederacy. The war had helped confirm, wrote Louisiana State University historian Gaines M. Foster, that the Confederate tradition “blended readily and smoothly with American nationalism and mission.”
By the time the townsfolk of Monticello, Georgia filled their square in the spring of 1910 to proudly inaugurate their new Confederate memorial, Southern whites were fully back in the American fold while remaining unapologetic in their defense of their region’s right to secede. And while they didn’t bemoan the end of slavery, Southern whites remained intent on restoring white supremacy. By 1914, all Southern states had passed segregation laws, and nothing represented the triumph of white supremacy more than the formal, legal establishment of two separate and unequal societies. The post-Civil War white South had finally invented a new social system—and regional tradition—in response to abolishment of slavery. If that weren’t enough, in November 1912, Southern-born Woodrow Wilson was elected president of the United States. White Southerners viewed his election not only as a kind of vindication, but evidence that their region once again ruled the Union.
Segregation laws were, of course, designed to control and contain African Americans. But they had the simultaneous effect of reining in whites. The Civil War and subsequent Northern occupation had already left white Southerners defensive of any real or perceived intrusion from outsiders. Now, the emergence of Jim Crow further fueled the climate of strict social conformity. The South, W.J. Cash argued, adhered to what he called “the savage ideal,” “whereunder dissent and variety are completely suppressed, and men become, in all their attitudes, professions and actions, virtual replicas of each other.”
But presumably all this conformity paid some sort of psychic dividends. While Northern whites had to fight for jobs and jockey for social position in polyglot cities, Southern whites—no matter how poor—could comfort themselves with the illusion that the subjugation of blacks gave all whites equal standing.
In 1928, Southern historian Ulrich B. Phillips concluded that despite the South’s vast diversity, the shared essence of the region was a “persistent defensive self-containment” and a “common resolve indomitably maintained—that it shall be and remain a white man’s country.” That, he wrote, was “the cardinal test of a Southerner.”
But the Civil Rights Movement, which gained momentum in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, began to threaten the certainty of that rule. So deeply identified was the South with segregation that observers wondered whether the end of segregation would spell the end of the South as a distinctive region. Despite the long road toward civil rights still ahead, in his 1957 book, Epitaph for Dixie, Arkansas journalist Harry S. Ashmore was certain that nothing could “turn back the forces that are reshaping the Southern region in the nation’s image.” A year later, another Arkansan, historian C. Vann Woodward, warned, “The time is coming, if indeed it has not already arrived, when the Southerner will begin to ask himself whether there is any longer any point in calling himself a Southerner.” Now that such things as the poll tax, the white primary, and the Jim Crow railway car were beginning to vanish, white Southerners, he wrote, “were suddenly aware of the vacant place they have left in the landscape and of the habit of depending on them in final resort as landmarks of our regional identification.”
At the same time, the South was losing another mark of regional distinction. In 1938, on the occasion of the release of a federal economic study, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the South “the nation’s number one economic problem.” Over the next four decades, however, the regional poverty rate converged so considerably with the national norm that by the 1970s, the place that once seemed—in the words of Southern literary historian Fred Dobson—“poor, violent, pessimistic, tragic, and mysterious” had suddenly transformed into a place some were calling “successful, optimistic, prosperous, and bland.” In 1977, the personification of a kinder and gentler South, Jimmy Carter, became president of the United States.
A year later, Mississippi-born novelist Walker Percy gave a lecture at the University of Georgia in which he concluded that Carter’s election was part and parcel of a larger phenomenon: “The South had entered the mainstream of American life for the first time in perhaps 150 years.” Not only did he find this transformation plain “boring,” but he feared the South would become a “quaint corner” of a suburbanized coast to coast Sunbelt whose spiritual heartland would lie somewhere between Dallas and Los Angeles. Alas, he figured, progress has its costs.
So, once again, the white South feared it would lose whatever it was that made it unique. Indeed, as University of Richmond historian Edward Ayers has written, “From its very beginning, people have believed that the South, defined against an earlier South that was somehow more authentic, more real, more unified and distinct, was not only disappearing but also declining.”
One bulwark against that decline is a hugely popular business that gives Southerners the feeling that the region’s homespun past is still present: the Cracker Barrel chain. Founded in 1969 as a combined restaurant and gift shop styled as an old-fashioned country general store, Cracker Barrel first positioned itself next to Interstate highway exits in the Southeast before going national in the 1980s. Today the publicly traded corporate eatery serves traditional “down home” Southern comfort food in 42 states, and each restaurant features a front porch lined with wooden rocking chairs and a stone fireplace with a shotgun and a deer head above the mantel. Clearly, you don’t have to be Southern to soak up its nostalgia.
In 1966, the Birmingham, Alabama-based publisher of an 80-year-old agriculture journal launched a lifestyle magazine called Southern Living. Filled with recipes, interior design ideas, and regional travel tips, Southern Living became, according to National Public Radio commentator Diane Roberts, the “lifestyle Bible” of the white South’s “genuine and aspiring upper middle class.” By 1985, when it sold to Time, Inc. for $498 million, it had become the most successful regional magazine of its kind.
But clearly not everyone can afford to entertain that version of Southern culture. One of the biggest effects the end of segregation had on Southern whites was the highlighting of the inequality that had always existed among them. “The fiction that all whites are equal as long as blacks were suppressed was shot to hell,” historian James C. Cobb told me. Cobb, a distinguished University of Georgia professor emeritus who literally wrote the book on Southern identity, invited me to spend a warm late summer day with him in Athens, Georgia talking about Southern history.
During a drive through town, a walk on campus, and hours in his small office where he has a black velvet painting of Elvis Presley behind his desk, Cobb explained to me that the Confederate battle flag is often the last bastion for poor whites looking for a way to assert some status. “You’re not going to find too many middle-class white Southerners waving rebel flags these days,” he said. “You just don’t feel the need to assert your whiteness when you own a rambling McMansion.” On the other hand, if you’re poor, white, and feeling anxious about your place in the world, “waving the rebel flag is a statement about being white when you think being white is the only thing you’ve got.”
He talked at length about the persistence of white Southern identity in a globalized world. Here, he says, like in so many places around the globe, folks are trying to retain some local distinctiveness in the face of a homogenizing planet. Like so many latter-generation ethnic Americans who fear the prospect of full assimilation, large numbers of Southerners have refused to disappear into a homogenized, placeless, post-ethnic whiteness.
Nowadays they are doing so by repackaging Southernness and selling it in the marketplace. And the very act of commodifying culture, Cobb says, automatically makes it a little performative.
As if to prove a point, Cobb invited me to a brunch hosted by Lee Epting, this college town’s premier caterer, a man one local paper has called part set designer and part historian. The brunch was held in a circa-1800 plantation house Epting had transported from South Carolina and then furnished with antiques. The food that morning—which included grits, fried chicken, and biscuits and gravy—was fabulous. But as Epting likes to say, a good party is full of stories. As the token Yankee—the modern definition of which I learned that day means “not a Southerner”—I got an extra serving of stories. Epting walked me through the house explaining the provenance of this or that artifact and identifying the faces in the family photos he had on the walls. But my host saved the best for last. Just before I was about to leave for another meeting on campus, Epting took me outside to show me an old fashioned three-hole outhouse. He said he had gotten a call a few years ago from a man who wanted to sell him a house he swore William Tecumseh Sherman had slept in during his infamous march to the sea. While the house turned out to be built after the Civil War, Epting says he then stumbled across a nearby outhouse, which, he claims, was actually built in 1842. He snapped it up and quickly brought it back to Athens. Now he has the pleasure of telling his most gullible out-of-town guests that this is where General Sherman shat.
