William E. Massey Sr. Lecture in the History of
American Civilization [1993]
‘The South is the region that history has happened to.”- Richard Weaver
I speak and write uneasily on the southern (conservative) tradition, an unpopular subject that has been gnawing at me for more than three decades. I am a native New Yorker who was born and raised in New York City and who has spent almost all except the last eight of his sixty-three years as a resident of New York State. My pretensions to being a southerner – for, alas, pretensions are all they are- rest on my having become fascinated with southern history while an undergraduate at Brooklyn College and on having settled my heart in Dixie soon thereafter. Certainly, I am devoted to the sentiment expressed in the bumper sticker: ‘Get your heart in Dixie or get your ass out!’ There are a great many reasons for my southern partisanship, the most important of which arose from my early recognition that the people of the South, across lines of race, class and sex, are as generous, gracious, courteous, decent – in a word, civilized – as any people it has been my privilege to get to know. And yes, I know I am open to the charge made against all converts of being plus royaliste que le roi, plus catholique que le Pope.
‘The South is the region that history has happened to.”- Richard Weaver
I speak and write uneasily on the southern (conservative) tradition, an unpopular subject that has been gnawing at me for more than three decades. I am a native New Yorker who was born and raised in New York City and who has spent almost all except the last eight of his sixty-three years as a resident of New York State. My pretensions to being a southerner – for, alas, pretensions are all they are- rest on my having become fascinated with southern history while an undergraduate at Brooklyn College and on having settled my heart in Dixie soon thereafter. Certainly, I am devoted to the sentiment expressed in the bumper sticker: ‘Get your heart in Dixie or get your ass out!’ There are a great many reasons for my southern partisanship, the most important of which arose from my early recognition that the people of the South, across lines of race, class and sex, are as generous, gracious, courteous, decent – in a word, civilized – as any people it has been my privilege to get to know. And yes, I know I am open to the charge made against all converts of being plus royaliste que le roi, plus catholique que le Pope.
As for being a conservative – a label applied to me
frequently these days by people who understand nothing - I have always expressed admiration for much
in conservative thought and have many friends among southern conservatives, not
to mention neoconservatives, free-market conservatives, and demonstratively crazy
conservatives. But I know of no one in any of those camps who does not smile when
hearing me described as any kind of conservative. This book has been written by
an outsider – a sympathetic, respectful, and I hope a fair-minded outsider, but
an outsider nonetheless.
I hear often, as do some others who come out of the Marxist Left, that we just love to cuddle with southern conservatives because they, too, criticize capitalism and beat up on the bourgeoisie. Apparently, we find them soul-brothers despite a few presumably inconsequential ideological and political differences. Maybe. But more important matters are at stake than the games intellectuals play. From the beginning of my academic career in the 1950s, I have argued that the Left would have to learn some hard lessons from southern conservatives it it were to rescue itself from the overt totalitarianism of Stalinism and the disguised totalitarian tendencies that infect left-liberalism and social democracy. The hard lessons I have in mind, which especially concern the Left’s rosy view of human nature and the irrationalities of its radical egalitarianism, may be gleaned from this book. Still, a proper exposition would require different kind of book. For ‘ a decent respect to the opinions of mankind’ requires that those of us who spent our lives in a political movement that piled up tens of millions of corpses to sustain a futile cause and hideous political regimes have a few questions to answer.
My reasons for choosing ‘the southern tradition’ as the topic for the Massey Lectures derive from but transcend such considerations. I am alarmed at the ‘modernization’ that is transforming the South. Doubtless, the transformation has much to recommend it, especially with respect to the long overdue if incomplete justice for black people. But I increasingly suspect that its desirable features are coming at a price northerners as well as southerners, blacks as well as whites, will rue having to pay and need not pay. That price includes a neglect of, or a contempt for history, the history of southern whites, without which some of the more distinct and noble features of American national life must remain incomprehensible. . . .
It is one thing to demand –and it must be demanded – that white southerners repudiate white supremacy. It is quite another to demand that they deny the achievements of their own people in a no less heroic struggle to build a civilization in a wilderness and to crate the world’s first great republic – to demand that they repent in sackcloth and ashes not only the undeniable enormities, but for the finest and most generous features of southern life. Recall the words of W. E. B. Du Bois ‘Of the Wings of Atlanta” in The Souls of Black Folk:
Once, they say, even Atlanta slept dull and drowsy at the foothills of the Alleghanies, until the iron baptism of war awakened her with its sullen waters, aroused and maddened her, and left her listening to the sea . . .
It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel the pang of the conquered, and ye know that with all the Bad that fell on one black day, something was vanquished that deserved to live, something killed that in justice had not dared to die; to know that with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something Wrong, something sordid and mean, something less than the broadest and the best. All this is bitter hard . . .
It is dangerous as well as wrong to obscure the genuinely tragic dimension of southern history –the extent to which courageous, God-fearing, honorable people rendered themselves complicit in slavery, segregation, and racism and ended up in defeat and degradation. That historical lesson speaks to all people in all times, warning of the corrupt and cruel tendencies inherent in or common humanity and the ease with which the social relations and institutions we sustain may encourage the most destructive aspects of our nature . . .
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.
And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children,
I hear often, as do some others who come out of the Marxist Left, that we just love to cuddle with southern conservatives because they, too, criticize capitalism and beat up on the bourgeoisie. Apparently, we find them soul-brothers despite a few presumably inconsequential ideological and political differences. Maybe. But more important matters are at stake than the games intellectuals play. From the beginning of my academic career in the 1950s, I have argued that the Left would have to learn some hard lessons from southern conservatives it it were to rescue itself from the overt totalitarianism of Stalinism and the disguised totalitarian tendencies that infect left-liberalism and social democracy. The hard lessons I have in mind, which especially concern the Left’s rosy view of human nature and the irrationalities of its radical egalitarianism, may be gleaned from this book. Still, a proper exposition would require different kind of book. For ‘ a decent respect to the opinions of mankind’ requires that those of us who spent our lives in a political movement that piled up tens of millions of corpses to sustain a futile cause and hideous political regimes have a few questions to answer.
My reasons for choosing ‘the southern tradition’ as the topic for the Massey Lectures derive from but transcend such considerations. I am alarmed at the ‘modernization’ that is transforming the South. Doubtless, the transformation has much to recommend it, especially with respect to the long overdue if incomplete justice for black people. But I increasingly suspect that its desirable features are coming at a price northerners as well as southerners, blacks as well as whites, will rue having to pay and need not pay. That price includes a neglect of, or a contempt for history, the history of southern whites, without which some of the more distinct and noble features of American national life must remain incomprehensible. . . .
It is one thing to demand –and it must be demanded – that white southerners repudiate white supremacy. It is quite another to demand that they deny the achievements of their own people in a no less heroic struggle to build a civilization in a wilderness and to crate the world’s first great republic – to demand that they repent in sackcloth and ashes not only the undeniable enormities, but for the finest and most generous features of southern life. Recall the words of W. E. B. Du Bois ‘Of the Wings of Atlanta” in The Souls of Black Folk:
Once, they say, even Atlanta slept dull and drowsy at the foothills of the Alleghanies, until the iron baptism of war awakened her with its sullen waters, aroused and maddened her, and left her listening to the sea . . .
It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream; to see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel the pang of the conquered, and ye know that with all the Bad that fell on one black day, something was vanquished that deserved to live, something killed that in justice had not dared to die; to know that with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something Wrong, something sordid and mean, something less than the broadest and the best. All this is bitter hard . . .
It is dangerous as well as wrong to obscure the genuinely tragic dimension of southern history –the extent to which courageous, God-fearing, honorable people rendered themselves complicit in slavery, segregation, and racism and ended up in defeat and degradation. That historical lesson speaks to all people in all times, warning of the corrupt and cruel tendencies inherent in or common humanity and the ease with which the social relations and institutions we sustain may encourage the most destructive aspects of our nature . . .
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.
And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children,
and
the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come
and smite the earth wit a curse
– Malachi 4:4-5
The perspectives offered by southern conservatives, which I have hastily sketched, remain alive, if at bay: opposition to finance capitalism and, more broadly, to the attempt to substitute the market for society itself; opposition to the radical individualism that is today sweeping America; support for broad property ownership and a market economy subject to socially determined moral restraints, adherence to Christian individualism that condemns personal license and demands submission to a moral consensus rooted in elemental piety; and an insistence that every people must develop its own genius, based on its special history, and must reject siren calls to internationalism – or rather, a cosmopolitanism –that would eradicate local and national cultures and standards of personal conduct by reducing morals and all else to commodities. . .
The basic problem with the ascendancy of the multinationals is not that they are hierarchical, cruel, or ill intentioned, however much they may be charged on all counts. Rather, it is that they are literally irresponsible. The cooperated under few if any moral constraints and can, with formal justification, claim not to be responsible for the creeping genocide in America or the savaging of the Third World, or with the moral degeneracy of modern life [‘It’s not our problem.’]
Yet if a return to small private property is a will-o’-the-wisp, the substitution of state property for private property has everywhere generated terrifying political regimes and, for good measure, economic incompetence. Thus, either we rethink the nature of property itself and devise forms that combine private ownership with a high level of social participation and control, or we decide to live in the world of Richard Weaver’s ‘moral idiots’ – a world comfortable for some or even many and brutal beyond description for the rest. . .
At issue here is the challenge to devise property relations that can sustain a ‘social bond individualism’ strong enough to repress both personal license and totalitarian tendencies. If we need to devise a creative system that combines social and private property ownership and renders it politically responsible, if we need to find ways to strengthen the political power of states and communities while recognizing the indispensability of a strong federal government in the solution of vast problems, if we are not to transform the market as a necessary center of the economy into a substitute for society itself; if we are to recover a sense of national purpose and moral consensus – then southern conservative thought, shorn of its errors and irrationalities, has at least as strong a claim to a respectful hearing as any other competing body of doctrine. . . .
The free marketeers wish no one ill, but their happy dream of a well ordered international economy of morally indifferent affluence for many and misery for those who cannot compete- a dream that constitutes my own private nightmare – is becoming a reality. We may indeed be on the threshold of a brave new world of affluent depravity for a good many people, perhaps even a majority of Americans. If so, I am glad to be too old to have to live with the worst of what is coming.
The current national drift into an ever deepening moral and political paralysis can be arrested. Here, too, the southern experience counsels against gloom and passivity. The people of the South have suffered defeat in War, have seen the collapse of their fondest expectations, and have accepted it all as God’s will. However distasteful many of their reactions in time and place, they have struggled bravely against cynicism and despair and have been well served by their trust in God and in their own free will. In their own way they have lived by Romain Rolland’s great dictum, ‘Pessimism of the intellect! Optimism of the will!’ As to the prospects for a constructive outcome to the time of troubles in which we live, the more generous and worldly side of the southern tradition offers its own special combination of hope and caution. Robert E. Lee expressed it shortly before he died. General Lee, then a college president, jotted down a few lines, for what purpose we do not know:
My experience often has neither disposed me to think worse of them, nor indisposed me to serve them; nor in spite of failures, which I lament, of errors, which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present state of affairs, do I despair of the future. The march of Providence is so slow, and our desires so impatient, the work of progress is so immense, and our means of aiding it so feeble, the life of humanity is so long, and that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave, and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.
and smite the earth wit a curse
– Malachi 4:4-5
The perspectives offered by southern conservatives, which I have hastily sketched, remain alive, if at bay: opposition to finance capitalism and, more broadly, to the attempt to substitute the market for society itself; opposition to the radical individualism that is today sweeping America; support for broad property ownership and a market economy subject to socially determined moral restraints, adherence to Christian individualism that condemns personal license and demands submission to a moral consensus rooted in elemental piety; and an insistence that every people must develop its own genius, based on its special history, and must reject siren calls to internationalism – or rather, a cosmopolitanism –that would eradicate local and national cultures and standards of personal conduct by reducing morals and all else to commodities. . .
The basic problem with the ascendancy of the multinationals is not that they are hierarchical, cruel, or ill intentioned, however much they may be charged on all counts. Rather, it is that they are literally irresponsible. The cooperated under few if any moral constraints and can, with formal justification, claim not to be responsible for the creeping genocide in America or the savaging of the Third World, or with the moral degeneracy of modern life [‘It’s not our problem.’]
Yet if a return to small private property is a will-o’-the-wisp, the substitution of state property for private property has everywhere generated terrifying political regimes and, for good measure, economic incompetence. Thus, either we rethink the nature of property itself and devise forms that combine private ownership with a high level of social participation and control, or we decide to live in the world of Richard Weaver’s ‘moral idiots’ – a world comfortable for some or even many and brutal beyond description for the rest. . .
At issue here is the challenge to devise property relations that can sustain a ‘social bond individualism’ strong enough to repress both personal license and totalitarian tendencies. If we need to devise a creative system that combines social and private property ownership and renders it politically responsible, if we need to find ways to strengthen the political power of states and communities while recognizing the indispensability of a strong federal government in the solution of vast problems, if we are not to transform the market as a necessary center of the economy into a substitute for society itself; if we are to recover a sense of national purpose and moral consensus – then southern conservative thought, shorn of its errors and irrationalities, has at least as strong a claim to a respectful hearing as any other competing body of doctrine. . . .
The free marketeers wish no one ill, but their happy dream of a well ordered international economy of morally indifferent affluence for many and misery for those who cannot compete- a dream that constitutes my own private nightmare – is becoming a reality. We may indeed be on the threshold of a brave new world of affluent depravity for a good many people, perhaps even a majority of Americans. If so, I am glad to be too old to have to live with the worst of what is coming.
The current national drift into an ever deepening moral and political paralysis can be arrested. Here, too, the southern experience counsels against gloom and passivity. The people of the South have suffered defeat in War, have seen the collapse of their fondest expectations, and have accepted it all as God’s will. However distasteful many of their reactions in time and place, they have struggled bravely against cynicism and despair and have been well served by their trust in God and in their own free will. In their own way they have lived by Romain Rolland’s great dictum, ‘Pessimism of the intellect! Optimism of the will!’ As to the prospects for a constructive outcome to the time of troubles in which we live, the more generous and worldly side of the southern tradition offers its own special combination of hope and caution. Robert E. Lee expressed it shortly before he died. General Lee, then a college president, jotted down a few lines, for what purpose we do not know:
My experience often has neither disposed me to think worse of them, nor indisposed me to serve them; nor in spite of failures, which I lament, of errors, which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present state of affairs, do I despair of the future. The march of Providence is so slow, and our desires so impatient, the work of progress is so immense, and our means of aiding it so feeble, the life of humanity is so long, and that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave, and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.
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