The Spirit of The South

It is a lion of prides, a place apart. It is the last American arena with a special, nurtured identity, its own sometimes unfashionable regard for the soil, for family ties, for the authority of God and country. Despite the influx of outsiders, the South remains a redoubt of old American tenets, enshrined for centuries by the citizenry.

Much has been changed by technology--notably the spread of the television set and the air conditioner. The South, nourished in isolation, now imports and exports ideas with the speed of electrons. The gospel songs that were once chanted by pentecostal choirs have gone commercial. Conversely, the South has seen the old enemy, the dreaded Yankees, up close on the evening news --and found that he and she are people very much like the folks from Dixie, only with a little more use for r at the end of a sentence.

More and more Yankee industries and individuals are moving to the deepest South, in no small part because air conditioning has altered the climate itself. Tyrannical heat, delirious summers, dog days that breed flies and sloth, squabbles and morbid introspection are gone with the vent.

But so much remains the same. Given its predominantly Anglo-Saxon traditions and largely Protestant population--black and white--Christian revelation is a way of life in Dixie. "Others tend to scoff at the Bible Belt," says former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, now a professor of international law at the University of Georgia. "But one can point to a strong sense of personal responsibility it engenders." Florida Governor Reubin Askew believes that "your faith has to be at the center of your life, and from it must emanate all your decisions."

Jimmy Carter's widely discussed "born again" experience may seem unusual to Northerners; in the South, it is a common occurrence. When a Southerner calls his territory "God's country," he is less Rotarian than religious --although a certain chauvinism may still shine through. A Valdosta, Ga., man likes to point to a sign displayed at a filling station that reads SMILE, GOD LOVES YOU. In the North, he claims, the sign would read WATCH OUT, GOD HAS HIS EYE ON YOU.

Says Oscar Carr Jr., who left his prosperous Mississippi farm to head the office of development of the national Episcopal Church in New York: "The greatest thing the South can offer the nation is its religious and moral sense. Once Southerners can jump into the economic mainstream they will be more liberal than people in Connecticut."

Patriotism may be out of favor nowadays in much of America, but it flourishes in the South. Rusk finds that "patriotism is not just jingoism down here. It is affection for the country and its values." To the Southern spirit, that affection includes a deep, often uncritical respect for the military. With good reason--the South receives income from military establishments scattered throughout its states; there are 15 major bases in Georgia alone. But income certainly cannot account for the exuberant displays of flags, the military spirit at football stadiums, the parades of veterans in freshly pressed uniforms. The military tradition in the South goes back to the Civil War. Says University of Georgia Historian Numan Bartley: "The Confederate army came out of the war with a great reputation which grew into mythology." That mythology took hold in family stories, in poetry like Allen Tate's Ode to the Confederate Dead:

Turn your eyes to the immoderate

past,

Turn to the inscrutable infantry

rising

Demons out of the earth.

A devotion to the country and service grew in the great military academies, Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel of South Carolina. Recalls Atlanta Journal Editor Jack Spalding: "There was a time when all Southerners understood the need for military force. It may be educated out of them in places, but there are still the basics here. We are close to the soil, more religious, and know what guns are for and why they must be used sometimes."

The well-kept marble statues of Confederate soldiers in almost every town square in the South testify to the love of militant lost causes--a love that has sometimes been misplaced. Long after the Viet Nam War had fallen out of favor with Northern conservatives, it still received support from the South. In the final days of Watergate, when the rest of the nation had been convinced of Nixon's guilt, the President still garnered sympathy and exhortations from Southerners who urged him to "Hang in there."

But the allegiance to lost causes has abated. The present Southern emotion is a sense of imminent victory--over circumstances, poverty and history. The feeling of inferiority is evaporating. Jimmy Carter, whatever the outcome in November, has already given the area a surge of confidence. Throughout the South there is a fresh appreciation of place and love of the land, an almost metaphysical feeling that they are moving at the heart of the world.

Even greater than pride in place is a strongly developed sense of family--not merely the nuclear one, but the broadsword virtues of the clan. This is partly because many Southern families have lived in the same territory for five or six generations, growing, spreading, developing deeper ties. To a largely rootless and mobile nation, children or grandchildren of the immigrant experience, this familial feeling seems foreign. Explains Spalding: "It is comforting for a Southerner, in a strange, hostile and wicked world, to know who he is, that someone will send his daughter a wedding present or come to his funeral."

Indeed, in the South, funerals are an integral part of the family experience. By the time a child has reached majority, he probably has been to a dozen funerals of older aunts, uncles and cousins. Obsequies provide a chance for catching up on the latest gossip or to do a little business. Southerners still pay condolence calls in the parlor, where they sit for hours with the bereaved, rarely mentioning the dead. At times, church services can be as flowery as a dime-store sympathy card--or as colorful as an Erskine Caldwell novel. Recently one backwoods Alabama dirt farmer was laid out in a dark suit, white shirt and tie. The old man had never before been so well dressed. His impressed relatives removed him from the casket, propped him against a wall and had him photographed for posterity. While elsewhere in the nation people are writing books and teaching university courses about how to face death with dignity, the South has long known about this instinctively. It knows that death is part of life.

But of the mixture of simple blood ties and rooted soil, of patriotic and military zeal, has risen a quality that many Northerners cannot find credible: a respect for law. It is this more than Christian principle or force of arms that has brought the South into contemporary life.

Long considered the most racially reactionary state, Mississippi briefly flared in violence, then integrated with a speed that astonished even its neighbors. Governor Mills Godwin of Virginia spoke for more than his home state when he said, "The racial issue is largely behind us because Virginians have a strong sense of law-and-order." Federal Judge James McMillan of Charlotte, N.C., echoed that North Carolinians would "litigate until hell freezes over, but when it freezes over, they'll go on about their business. The law is the law, and they respect it."

Yet it is one of the South's many paradoxes that violence is not far from the surface. Montgomery, Ala., Lubbock, Texas, and Savannah, Ga., have the three highest murder rates in the nation, in part because of the gun-toting tradition and a sense that honor dictates that real or imagined wrongs must be redressed. But up North, the combined rate of violent crimes (murder, rape, aggravated assault and robbery) is still greater than that of the South. Almost everywhere, people can walk the Dixie streets without having to fear muggings or purse snatchings.

Throughout its long and often tragic history, the South was looked upon as an arena that endured much and learned little. Could it be that in many ways it can now teach the nation something about how to live? The idea can easily be exaggerated, but there is truth in it. The fact was foreshadowed by the South's agrarian romantics of the 1930s, who in a sense anticipated the "greening of America," the new emphasis on human values and environment. Later the harshly segregated South showed the rest of the nation that it was possible to change despite deeply held prejudices --and to achieve at least the beginnings of racial amity. Other parts of the U.S., without consciously turning to the South, began to long for some of its values: family, community, roots. There was a new, only half-understood bond of sympathy between the only part of America ever to have lost a war and other Americans who had met their first defeat in Viet Nam. Summing up the Southern ability to outlast adversity, William Faulkner declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "I decline to accept the end of man... I believe that man will not merely endure, he will prevail." Most Americans, whether they knew those words or not, were suddenly more ready to receive their meaning.

With the curse of racism beginning to lift, one can perceive a kind of liberality. Notes Sheldon Hackney, president of Tulane University: "Traditionally, the South has been quite tolerant. Localities tolerate the village atheist arid the lonely radical. The family tolerates. The South, more than other places, honors the strong individual stand, the person who says what he believes."

In his classic The Mind of the South, W.J. Cash considered the new skyscrapers and pondered: "Softly, do you not hear behind that the gallop of Jeb Stuart's cavalrymen?" At times the hoofbeats of a defeated army are still audible, even on the courthouse squares, even in the halls of Congress, even in the cadences of Jimmy Carter.

But they are soon drowned out by a new beat--the frank clang of cash registers, of buildings going up, of dirt roads being paved, of high school and college bands exhorting their black and white football stars to victory, of new leaders with old courtesies, of expectations that no longer seem visionary or Utopian.

"The past is still with us," admits Dean Rusk, "but it no longer sets the tone." It is the future that seems to inhabit the South. It is a rather surprising place for the future to be, and the region still wrestles uncomfortably with it, amid fears of homogenization.

Industrialization and the growth of cities have already brought attendant blight: air pollution, traffic congestion, billboarded highways and garish fast-food enterprises. To Southern Journalist John Egerton (The Americanization of Dixie), "The modern, acquisitive, urban, industrial, post-segregationist, on-the-make South, its vices nationalized, its virtues evaporating if not already dissipated, is coming back with a bounce in its step, like a new salesman on the route, eager to please, intent on making it."

But the South has changed before --and remained the same, through slavery and secession, independence and defeat, emancipation, reconstruction and integration. The best exposition of its present condition came from one of its major prophets, Martin Luther King, who liked to quote a favorite Baptist preacher: "We ain't what we want to be. We ain't what we gonna be. But, thank God, we ain't what we was."

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