The American South and American Minds

Thinking about the South and questions of capital-E Exceptionalism means, ultimately, considering how others view the South as much as it does how Southerners view themselves. In the field of intellectual history, this is a useful tool to use in a deep analysis of how the South has been perceived, and used in 20^th century American discourse. Here I’ll lay out a few thoughts on questions we as historians can ask, while zooming in on the post-1965 period for my examination. In the process, I hope to begin a series on the American South and a variety of “minds”, which I’ll get to in a moment. Also, I want to make clear that questions of how the American South is perceived by other nations—say, those in Europe or Latin America—is also a useful exercise. A recent article in the Journal of Southern History, for example, covers the topic of Great Britain’s interpretation of “the South” through music.[1]

One key area of study for Southern identity and Southern ideology is within American Leftism. Of course, Andrew Hartman’s already turning towards a history of American Communism, a project that I’m definitely intrigued to see the results of down the road. Furthermore, Kurt Newman has certainly posed some serious questions about what it means to be on the Left in the 20^th century, and both are beginning the exercise of a panel on the Left and American foreign policy. (Of course, this began right after Michael Walzer’s essay about the Left and American Foreign Policy in the pages of the most recent Dissent magazine.) But what I’m proposing here is that we also should consider how the American Left views the American South. This is a complicated question, one that for the purposes of my upcoming series can be seen as beginning during the New Deal/Popular Front era and continuing through the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. At times, the South has served as an adversary for the Left, and at other times, as a potential “land of opportunity” for renewed political activism.

In many ways, the idea of the South in the liberal mind is related to how the South is analyzed in the left-wing mind, but with some caveats. For both, the South can be seen as an enemy and also as a land where new activism/political converts can be gained. In recent years, political historians have begun to write more about the collapse of Southern liberalism in the 20^th century. Built on a quicksand of changing Southern race relations, liberalism in the South made some headway in the middle of the 20^th century, but fell apart in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to a variety of factors: civil rights, growth of economic opportunity in the Sunbelt region, and new GOP strategies that began to cleave the South from the New Deal coalition as early as the 1950s.[2] And, as I’ve stated before, understanding how the Democratic Party rebuilds itself in the 1970s and 1980s is a story essential to writing an intellectual history of the recent American past. Conceptions of the South matter here, especially when considering the arguments between progressive activists (folks arguing in the pages of The Nation, Dissent, and of course, The Progressive) and members of the Democratic Leadership Council, or DLC. The DLC was filled with Southern Democrats, such as Sam Nunn, Al Gore, Jr. and most notably Bill Clinton. The South as an idea—and as a place with some electoral votes that were still up for grabs in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, stands out as something that we need to understand if we’re to get at what liberals thought about their future as an ideology in the late 20^th century.

Now, there is the conservative mind to consider here too, but I’ll end instead on the African American mind and its relationship to the South.[3] Recently I’ve pressed the idea of regional differences among African Americans. I also, after some good discussion in the comments section, want to study differences among African Americans within the South. But how the South exists in the essays, magazines, and books written by African American intellectuals since the “end” of the Civil Rights era in the mid-1960s could provide more information on the continued debates among African Americans about, as Dr. King put it, “Where Do We Go From Here?” Such questions can also aid in asking new questions about African American ideology beyond the Civil Rights/Black Power paradigm of the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the very least, we need to understand how these questions were often dependent on urban/rural divides, regional differences, and even questions raised by African Americans in both major political parties (as well as at independent Black political conventions and think tanks).

In the coming weeks I mean to get at these questions. There may yet be some new questions about the South, and what the South “means” the rest of the nation, that we can get at here on the blog in coming posts. Next week I’ll start an attempt to get at the South and the American Left mind.