Southern Pride no longer exists, except as a nostalgia for what true southerners heard their parents and grandparents talking about. If anything, it is more of a rural pride – there were no cities to speak of in the old South. Metro Atlanta now has twice as many people as the whole state of Georgia had in 1950. Akin to the country pride felt in Vermont or Upper Michigan or Nebraska.
Southerners “Can still hear the soft summer breeze in the live-oak trees”, and that pride, if dissected would pass tangentially by the same kinds of historical mistakes made by well-meaning people in all times and places. Nobody now cares about that shit, they’re proud of a deeper lifestyle that has nearly disappeared
I notice that people still can’t seem to come up with this ‘glorious past’ prior to the 20th century that isn’t ‘White people taking credit for food and music black people invented’. And the 20th century stuff is predominantly created by people who rejected the traditional values of the South by doing things like writing books, being gay, or moving up north. Tennessee Williams might be considered a southern author, but he would have been risking life and limb to simply walk hand in hand with his boyfriend in much of the South today (much less 70+ years ago).
Most of it is. Just look at the percentage of people who voted for the orange con-man and who refuse to wear a mask to stop the spread of a global pandemic. Just look at what happens if you’re black of visibly queer and decide to stop off at an out of the way grocery store or gas station at night. And again, my perspective is not some some outsider sneering at how an accent sounds, it is someone born and raised here who’s partner has been threatened with being dragged behind a truck for looking ‘like a dyke bitch’, who grew up around jokes like ‘wish I had a few n-rs to move this for me,’ and who is currently spending a lot of time at home because “southern pride” has these idiots rejecting the recommendation from book-readers to wear a mask.
There are areas that are rising above the “glorious past”, but it’s by rejecting “Southern Pride”, not embracing traditional southern values. I used to feel kind of like the OP, and I still love southern cooking and the terrain, but fuck “Southern Pride” and the people who try to defend it.
That’s the best you can come up with for literature - a guy who wrote one book and no plays or stories or poems? It’s not really much of a mark for the South’s glorious history of the arts that you’re listing someone who wrote a bunch of political papers - while important, they’re not generally what someone is looking for as ‘literature’ (and note that my original ask was for ‘literature’, not ‘writing’ in general).
Also, in his one book “He wrote extensively about slavery, his dislike of race-mixing, a justification of white supremacy, and his belief that whites and blacks could not co-exist in a society where the black population was free.” Which rather supports my point.
Fair. It’s actually kind of interesting that there’s so little surviving literature from the slavery South. It’s not that the slavers were stupid–for all their evil, there was a fair amount of villainous intelligence at work. And it’s not that they weren’t imaginative: they imagined their horrific system as a utopia and planned to expand it across the Americas. What gives, then?
Again, I have no desire to defend “Southern Pride”; the phrase is almost always used to identify truly odious shit. I am, however, interested in how various cultural groups in the South have interacted with one another, both violently and otherwise; and the lack of surviving decent literature from slavery White southern culture is kind of weird.
In looking at Wikipedia, there’s definitely an idea that a lot of it was explicitly pro-slavery, and so odious that it doesn’t get read today. Maybe that’s it.
I was thinking, maybe being part of a tyrannical minority ruling a population through terror and violence doesn’t leave any time for writing good literature. But Rudyard Kipling.
I was technically raised a Southerner. Technically, because the area of West Texas was just a godforsaken, unpopulated wasteland at the time of the Civil War. But it was in Texas. And the community I was raised in was all about racism. Totally and 100% racist, and so it remains today from all accounts. As far as I can tell, that really is the entire Southern heritage.
My guess was that it was mainly the lack of major cities mentioned above. You need cities for printing presses and publishing houses, for newspapers and universities to keep the writers fed, and for a middle-class literary culture to nurture them. Writers don’t always come from cities, but cities are where they write their books.
I don’t know but it seems among some there’s a position of telling southern-USA whites “you’ve got nothing good to claim when it comes to heritage or culture”. I’m not sure I want to do that. If there were a broad direct repudiation of the Lost Cause, Antebellum glory fantasies, and supremacism, I’d be comfortable with letting them celebrate whatever else they like about their way of life.
My guess was that it was mainly the lack of major cities mentioned above. You need cities for printing presses and publishing houses, for newspapers and universities to keep the writers fed, and for a middle-class literary culture to nurture them. Writers don’t always come from cities, but cities are where they write their books.
Well, I was just idly scrolling through the documents of the historical society of my rural New England town which for the 250 or so years of its existence was never more than 2000 people, and Boston, being 120 miles away, was not a big influence over it. Yet, this single tiny town was home to Archibald MacLeish, Mary Lyon who founded Mt.Holyoke College, several quite well-known painters (one of whom lived on the next farm over from mine), and a number of other people deemed highly cultured and influential. And my town is not at all unique in New England, which from the outset valued education and intellectual attainment. The South does not. It was settled by the younger sons of the aristocracy of Britain who intended to set up feudal estates, not colleges and music societies. Since they were perfectly idle, it fell to the white underclass manage their plantations. It is this class which ultimately came to dominate white Southern culture – often Scots or Scots-Irish, a tribal, pugnacious, intolerant group suspicious of book learning, and anything citified or elite. They are the same group that settled most of the Appalachians as well. They are the heart of trump’s ‘base’. Ever since the English took over their homeland (in what, the 16th century?) they’ve hated the educated ruling classes which despise them, while taking out their anger on the those even less powerful.
I believe this continuing historical maelstrom of aggressive intolerance and willful ignorance is one of the main sources of political energy in the US. Although one of the others is the tradition of scientific inquiry, humanism, egalitarianism, and utopian ideals which emanated from New England and the Quaker legacy of Pennsylvania, and spread westward across the northern half of the US.
My conclusion at the moment is that the only people in the South who have anything worthwhile to contribute are Black.
Well, this board is dedicated to fighting ignorance. As a Southerner who thinks “Southern Pride” and “Southern Heritage” is a bunch of bullshit, prove me wrong! Like I asked before, tell me what amazing art, literature, science, and the like the South’s glorious past have contributed to me today, and then strip the list of ‘stuff black people did and white people took credit for’ and show me what’s left. Take away the lost cause, Antebellum glory fantasies, and white supremacist art (like minstrel shows) and what exactly is there to celebrate?
Let’s give a stupidly easy comparison - the glorious past of The South from colonial times until 1900 (so more than a century) vs Germany in the first half of the 20th century. That’s supposed to be ‘peak south’, while Germany 1900-1950 started as an aggressive imperialist state with little love for art, hit a huge depression, then was led by an incredibly virulent government (one of the few worse than the Confederacy), then was recovering from the war that government started. Yet Germans produced a ton of artistic and scientific works - for quick examples, German Expressionism was a major artistic movement, Germany generated more Nobel laureates than any other country until WW2 and such names as Einstein, Planck, Geiger, and Heisenburg are ‘fairly’ well known. There’s even major accomplishments during the Nazi years - their scientists led the world in development of jet aircraft and rocketry, and Hugo Boss’s uniform design is still hugely influential today. What does the glorious South offer by comparison?
And hey, even the Nazi copies of Greek and Roman statuary look pretty damn good compared to:
Setting aside the association of a particular ethnoidentity with “tribal pugnaciousness”(really?), this is one always puzzling sociopolitical paradox – doesn’t just happen in the US South, but it is very sharply exemplified in this case: Those who the ruling overclass treat and even explicitly label as “trash”, turn out to be reliable at fighting fiercely for perpetuation of the system that put them in that position.
Not only have the Southerners I’ve known largely been a bunch of trash, very many of them wore the “trash” moniker with an unusually high level of pride.
If you’re southern and want, for some reason, to find pride in your region instead of simply your state, like all the rest of us Americans do, there’s plenty to choose from:
Science: George Washington Carver, Crawford Long, Horace Lawson Hunley, among others.
The arts, music: Louis Armstrong, The Allman Brothers, Ray Charles. among others.
The arts, literature: Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and others.
If you insist on using the Confederate flag as your regional symbol–if, in fact, you insist on a regional symbol at all–you’re doing a disservice to your state and the great people who lived there, including those who are of African descent. You shouldn’t be surprised, then, if others attach the stereotypes that accompany that symbol.