The Lasting South? A Reconsideration After Fifty Years

MARK G. MALVASI is Professor of History at
Randoph-Macon College. He is the author of The
Unregenerate South: The Agrarian Thought of John Crowe
Ransom, Allen Tate, and Donald Davidson and, most
recently, he first novel, Merigan.

From the perspective of the twenty-first
century, the 1950s seem to many Americans
a decade of affluence, security, optimism,
and contentment set apart from the
uncertain and discordant years that preceded
and followed them, an interlude when life
was simpler, easier, and happier. The fifties
endure in popular memory and national
mythology as a refuge from the hardships of
the Great Depression and the Second World
War as well as from the fiasco of Vietnam, the
shame of Watergate, and the social revolutions
of the 1960s and the 1970s. Confident
of the innate superiority and inevitable triumph
of their way of life, Americans during
the Eisenhower Era could justly think themselves
the masters of fate. History, it seemed,
was on their side. The essays collected in The
Lasting South offer an alternate vision.

At least since the emergence of the Tertium
Quids during Thomas Jefferson’s second
administration, southern conservatives
have expounded the most trenchant native
critique of American politics, society, and
culture. Writing 150 years after the Quids,
the fourteen contributors to The Lasting South
did their utmost to sustain that tradition of
dissent. At the same time, they, like their
forebears, reaffirmed the cherished principles
and values that they believed modern
Americans had discarded or betrayed. Their
main emphasis, of course, was to clarify and
preserve the identity of the South, a difficult
undertaking at a time when growing numbers
of Americans condemned the South as a
bastion of racism and segregation and when
some, such as the newspaper editor Harry
Ashmore of Little Rock, Arkansas, pronounced
An Epitaph for Dixie. In that book,
published, like The Lasting South, in 1957,
Ashmore disparaged as maudlin, pernicious,
and antiquated a southern ethic that failed to
meet the requirements of life in the twentieth
century, whatever those may have been. But
it was expressly the crisis of the modern world
that the authors of The Lasting South wished
to address in promulgating a defense of their
homeland.

Modernity, wrote Louis D. Rubin Jr.,
was “the most deadly enemy” of the South.¹
Among the ominous modern developments
was the advent of an enervating conformity,
for which “the persistent individuality of the
South” furnished the one sure antidote (ix).
In an egalitarian democracy such as the
United States, Rubin and his colleagues noted,
the attraction of conformity had become
nearly universal, both as a practical expedient
and as a moral imperative. Conformity
was not only necessary, it was also right.
Success and even survival in modern America,
Rubin argued, depended on the urge to
conform and on the “unparalleled ability to
adapt…to current opportunities and needs,”
liberated from “the restraining and hampering
weight of custom”(3).

Tension between conformity and individualism
was an important element in the
political, social, and cultural history of the
1950s. Anticipating Rubin’s conclusion,
William H. Whyte Jr. declared in The Organization
Man, a classic study of suburban
middle-class attitudes, values, mores, and
habits, that “adaptation has become more
than a necessity; in a life in which everything
changes, it has become almost a constant.”²
In The Lonely Crowd, sociologists David
Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney
explored the nature of the “other-directed”
personality, which sought approval, identity,
and meaning through constant adjustment
to the demands, outlook, and inclinations
of the group. The “other-directed
person” aimed to correspond “not so much
in the external details” of life, such as “clothes,
curtains, [and] bank credit…as in the quality
of his inner experience.”³ Although Vance
Packard, author The Status Seekers (1959),
assumed that many Americans detested “the
growing conformity and sterility of their
life,” he also wondered “how to achieve a
creative life in these conforming times.”⁴
Under circumstances in which everyone
tried to be like everyone else, in which the
need to belong had superseded the quest for
originality and independence, Southerners
argued that fashion had replaced manners,
morals, and customs as the guide to conduct,
giving rise to an inarticulate, disaffected, and
helpless class of “rootless urbanites” (40). No
people, asserted Clifford Dowdey, “has ever
been so lonely and none have sought so
desperately to find identity in crowds” (32).

The vulgar rule of the masses, “the greying
standardization of…so-called democracy,”
“the psychotic compulsion to sameness,” the
“vast, grey anonymity,” as Dowdey put it,
“was historically abhorrent to the Southerner,”
who instead embraced an aristocratic
spirit that revered character, liberty, and
honor. In an age of conformity, however,
“any divergence is regarded as a cancer in
the body politic” (40,41,44,34). The modern
individual, if such a term still applied, had
thus become captive to prevailing opinion.
The continual need to accommodate to, and
acquiesce in, the will of the group, the urgent
longing to appear normal and to fit in, had
engendered in Americans a permanent immaturity
that arrested the evolution of a
genuine consciousness of self. Men remained
perpetual adolescents, whose duty it was to
do as they were told. Many Americans, so the
writers of The Lasting South feared, were
prepared to surrender their freedom in exchange
for assurances of prosperity, wellbeing,
and happiness. They wanted only to
be cared for. This false, timid, and irresponsible
choice had bred a tyranny far more
subtle and comprehensive than that of the
authoritarian regimes, which the modern
democratic order was meant to replace. It
was, after all, the Southerners reasoned, psychologically
easier to resist a despotism intent
to manipulate, persecute, and oppress than it
was to resist a despotism, like that of the
welfare state, imposed in the name of compassion,
humanity, and benevolence.

The enduring problem, these southern
thinkers discerned, was to restrain power
without at the same time destroying freedom.
By the 1950s, suggested Richard
Weaver in “The South and the American
Union,” Americans had lost their distrust of
power. Captivated by the uninterrupted success,
the incomparable prosperity, and the
extraordinary good fortune they had en
most Americans, Weaver charged,
placed their faith in limitless progress, assuming
that their country was impervious to the
misfortunes that had befallen other men.
Embracing the legend of “American
exceptionalism,” they resolved

that the United States is somehow exempt from
the past and present fate, as well as from many of
the necessities, of other nations. Ours is a special
creation, endowed with special immunities. As a
kind of millenial [sic] state, it is not subject to the
trials and divisions that have come upon others
through time and history. History, it is commonly
felt, consists of unpleasant things that
happen to other people, and America bade good
bye to the sorrows along with the vices of the Old
World (46).

A Christian pessimism fused with the experience
of defeat had, by contrast, instilled in
most Southerners the melancholy wisdom
that only the recognition of tragedy can
bring. They knew that there was no avoiding
the exigencies and vicissitudes of the human
condition.

Proceeding from this fundamentally conservative
view of mankind, Weaver insisted
that modern Americans were deceiving themselves
about human nature and human prospects,
denying the essential tragedy of life for
which reason had no answer. Their fallacy
originated in the Enlightenment conception
of the American as a new man who defied the
limits of tradition and faith, nature and
history. America had become an idea to be
shaped and reshaped according to the mind
and will. The effort to recover the original
innocence of man, which seemed possible in
an America isolated from the wages of sin and
the ravages of time, negated the venerable
belief in human evil, impotence, and tragedy.
The redemption from history and the
regeneration of humanity became the very
ethos of America to which all Americans
were obliged to give unconditional assent.
Together these convictions took on the force
of revealed truth. As a consequence, Weaver
alleged, the dominant impetus of American
thought had become utopian. In America,
the idea of utopia, which for Thomas More
was an unattainable “no place,” became
confused with a community immanent in
history, a prophetic intuition of the future to
which Americans alone belonged as no other
people ever has or can. The land of opportunity
and possibility, Weaver confirmed, was
always in the making, with Americans forever
departing one paradise to enter another
that was new and improved.

Weaver contrasted this “Faustian” impulse
“to make things over in its own image”
with the “Classical ideal of fixity and stability”
that distinguished the South. “Faustian
man,” he wrote, was “a restless striver, a
yearner after the infinite, a hater of statis
[sic], a man who is unhappy unless he feels
that he is making the world over” (51).
During the twentieth century, the old lie that
human beings could become as the gods and
create a heaven on earth had grown in extent
and peril, not only because modern men had
at their disposal more powerful tools and
more destructive weapons than had their
predecessors, but also because modern men
were less capable of prudence, judgment, and
self-restraint. Assured that progress was inevitable,
modern men, perhaps none more so
than Americans, were impatient with obstacles
of any sort. They exhibited what
Weaver called “the spoiled-child psychology,”
the conviction that there was nothing
they could not know, nothing they could not
do, nothing they could not have, and that
they may obtain their heart’s desire through
complaints, insolence, and threats. “The
spoiled child,” Weaver elaborated, “has not
been made to see the relationship between
effort and reward. He wants things, but he
regards payment as an imposition or as an
expression of malice by those who withhold
it. His solution […] is to abuse those who do
not gratify him.”⁵ To reverse these distorjoyed
tions, Weaver commended the Southern
world view, which extolled moderation and
forbearance, acknowledging the limits of
human power and the tragedy that ensued
when they are breached.

Traditional Southerners may have preferred
the inherited pattern of imperfection,
but the disposition of modern Americans was
that of “an army on the march,” preparing to
attack, subdue, and vanquish in the name of
progress and improvement (54). Defiantly
unprogressive, the South was the exception.
Southerners long assailed a doctrine of progress
that sacrificed the charms of humane living
to the rigors of efficient operation, knowing
too well that attempts to harness nature had
often degenerated into attempts to conquer
nature. Throughout all facets of Southern
life, natural constraints prevailed, impeding
the most unruly and explosive aspects of the
human personality. Hunters and fishermen,
for example, never presumed to kill or catch
more game than they and their families could
eat. Any excess was wasted. It was incumbent
upon all to conserve the environment for
their good and for the use of future generations,
not least because God had ordained
men to be the stewards of His creation. The
rural southerners who dwelled in harmony
with the rhythms of the natural world were
thus “zealous conservationists” who in time
aspired “to repeal the law of progress” (114-
15). When vanity replaced survival, lamented
Robert D. Jacobs, the civilized men who set
out “to feed their egos, not their stomachs”
lost their piety. Armed with more precise,
sophisticated, and monstrous weapons, they
began to kill for “sport,” that is, for pleasure,
and “the strings of fish, the kills of game,
became larger to attest to the prowess of the
hunter[…]” (115, 113). The transfer of the
forests, hills, rivers, and lakes to industrialists,
lumber and mining companies, and real
estate moguls logically followed. The desecration
of the earth had begun with the
pollution of the mind.

Despite the historic wastefulness of plantation
agriculture, the conservation of nature
has long been vital to the Southern conservative
tradition. In the 1930s, the Agrarians
condemned the brazen irreverence toward,
and consequent defiance of, nature. By the
1950s, Southern conservative thinkers had
come to appreciate, perhaps earlier than any
other group of Americans, that human beings
could not exploit nature with impunity.
To do so was to endanger life itself. They
anticipated what has since become self-evident:
that the scientific and technological
rearrangement of nature has drawn the world
closer to death. Questioning the cult of
progress, Southerners worried that, in subjugating
nature, science and technology in the
twentieth century had also effaced humanity.
Eliminating human purposes from life, science
and technology had moved closer to
becoming the principal instruments of man’s
annihilation

The Southern respect for nature, like the
Southern mistrust of progress, arose from the
religious premise that creation was ultimately
intractable and unfathomable and
that, in any event, men could not place it fully
under their dominion. Having acquired what
James McBride Dabbs called a “sense of
dependency”—a “sense of submission to the
unpredictable”—Southerners contradicted
the reassuring modern assumption that “nothing
bad can happen”(79, 80, 120). They
knew from hard experience that the worst
could and frequently did happen, and that
men could do little either to anticipate it or
to prepare for it. Southerners appreciated
their own disabilities and imperfections.
Nevertheless, objected Walter Sullivan, “under
pressure from advertising agencies and
automobile salesmen, from stock brokers
with optimistic analyses and charts and clergymen
with a new and more progressive
eschatology, we are seduced by the philosophy
that the future holds nothing for us to
fear, that whatever can happen is bound to
happen for the good” (120). Not all problems,
though, had solutions. Among those
that did, the solutions commonly occasioned
new and unforeseen difficulties. Most problems,
in essence, were never solved as much
as, in one way or another, they simply ceased
to matter.

That revelation came as no very great
epiphany to most Southerners whose faith
did not reside in the hope of earthly success
or, as Sullivan expressed it, in “the…promise
of a perfect tomorrow…of perpetual happiness
and tranquility” (123-24,125). Even the
rare victory did not alter the treacherous and
sorrowful facts of life. Understanding that the
kingdom was not of this world, Southern
conservatives remained unpopular with their
fellow countrymen, for they evinced the
conviction that eternal truths endured and
merited the respect of a people who were
historically impatient, dissatisfied, restive,
and truculent, convinced, as James J. Kilpatrick
wrote, “that the grass must be greener somewhere
else” (189).

During the 1950s, American conservatism
was in retreat. In 1955, two years before
the appearance of The Lasting South and at a
time when few Americans were willing to
designate themselves as “conservative,” Louis
Hartz announced in The Liberal Tradition in
America that liberalism was the only American
political tradition, or at least the only
political tradition of consequence. According
to the optimistic fantasy that Hartz and
other liberals celebrated, society was perfectible,
original sin nonexistent, and men,
through their own agency, capable of transforming
the world. How odd, deviant, and
frightful must have seemed those conservative
Southerners who refused to abandon
their belief in the depravity of man, the
efficacy of grace, the divinity of Christ, and
the reality of the Last Judgment.⁶

Notwithstanding the religious orientation
of Southern conservative thought, the writers
of The Lasting South did not forsake their
secular commitments. In the political realm,
they assailed a nationalism that demanded the
consolidation of authority at the expense of
individual freedoms, traditional rights, and
local prerogatives. “The Confederacy was
formed, and fought for its life,” admitted
Clifford Dowdey, “in order to avoid becoming
Americanized,” and the modern
southerner, “like his Confederate ancestors…is
most happy where least American” (44-45).
Was it intellectually treasonous of Southerners
to doubt the rectitude and virtue of the
American way of life, especially during the
1950s when the United States stood as a
fortress against communism? Was not
America the most radiant beacon to shine
forth in all the long, dark, painful history of
the world? Southern conservatives did not
think so. Even as they resisted communism
and the degradation of humanity that it
augured, Southern conservatives rebuked
the American will to power that projected
the image of millennial perfection onto the
United States. History, they agreed, had
compromised, if not wholly discredited, the
transcendent meaning and the moral authority
of America. The American was not the
embodiment of innocence any more than
America was the City of God.

It was in this historical and moral context
that Southern conservatives in the 1950s
interpreted the national quarrel over race
relations. To be rudely candid, there was no
defense for the segregation of black people in
the South. Separate was indubitably not
equal. All arguments to the contrary were
false, ignoble, and unbecoming of the finest
traditions of Southern tolerance and generosity.
Yet, conservative opinion about race
relations was far from unanimous. Some,
such as Walter Sullivan, presumed that, for
good or ill, Southern society would integrate
in time. Others went further. Ellington White
equated the persecution of blacks with whites’
concern to safeguard their own prestige,
security, and rights, an anxious and fainthearted
bourgeois morality foreign to, and
unworthy of, the aristocratic spirit of the
South. James McBride Dabbs variously described
segregation as a “principle of dissociation,”
a “source…of spiritual disvalue,”
and a “way of non-life” (77-78). Louis D.
Rubin Jr. conceded the maltreatment blacks
had suffered, and understood that their foremost
grievance lay not in the denial of equal
access and opportunity but rather, and more
profoundly, in “the insult to their pride.”
The source of blacks’ frustration, anger, and
distress, Rubin continued, lay in “the hundred
little things, mass humiliations, that are
intended primarily to remind ‘Them’ that
they are Inferior. It is the knowledge that in
the eyes of the white man who governs their
region, even the best and finest that their race
produces is in essential things equated with
the meanest and most wretched” (11). Francis
Butler Simkins, on the contrary, professed
that “faith in the Biblical heritage is a factor
second only to White Supremacy as a means
of conserving the ways of the South,” while
James Kilpatrick wrote that “an overwhelming
majority of the people in the South
believe in the prudence and wisdom of
essential race segregation within the Southern
States” (84, 202). However regrettable
these observations, Simkins and Kilpatrick
spoke the truth.

Although differing about race relations,
Southerners concurred that arrogance and
rancor had prompted Northerners to disdain
constitutional restraints and to effect integration
by judicial fiat. Under the pretext of
eliminating inequality and thereby rectifying
injustice, the national government had
extended the scope of its power, and by this
revolutionary edict had reduced state governments
to impotence. Henceforth, advised
Southern conservatives, the sovereign in
Washington, D.C., would oblige all to endorse
abstract and remote national standards
at the expense of local custom and regional
diversity. As a result, government would no
longer rest on the consent of the governed,
and authority would no longer be subject to
lawful controls. Americans, Kilpatrick resolved,
had unwittingly exchanged “government
by the people for government by
judicial oligarchy,” a transaction that rendered
all citizens mere vassals in service to the
omnipotent state (198).

The burden of this oppression would fall as
heavily on blacks as on whites, perhaps more
so, for, as Kilpatrick and several of the other
essayists conjectured, officials of the national
government would encourage blacks to see
themselves as a custodial people incapable of
functioning without remedial assistance. They
would not be free men; they would be
dependents, slaves in all but name. Aiding
blacks was the prime method whereby the
national government, already grown “immense,”
“unapproachable,” and “monolithic,”
had enhanced its domination over
the individual lives of the American people
(204). The Southern conservative argument
had merit and cannot be conveniently dismissed
as an expression of racial animosity.
As Southerners were quick to point out, the
Constitution did not provide for universal
equality, but guaranteed only a more limited
equality before the law. The exercise of
justice in the United States, therefore, did
not require the achievement of complete
social, political, or economic equality. But
when blacks could not obtain equality before
the law—when, in fact, the law itself conspired
to prevent them from exerting the
rights to which they, as citizens, were legally
entitled—where were they to turn? The
Southern conservative historian George C.
Rogers Jr. ascertained the problem. Acknowledging
that “we have affirmative action
because the South was too slow in ending
segregation and race discrimination (and the
South should be ready to accept these criticisms),”
Rogers exposed a crucial weakness
in the Southern conservative philosophy.⁷
During the 1950s, the decent and responsible
conservatives of the South did nothing, or
next to nothing, to end white supremacy.
What could they have done? They championed
the rights of local communities to
decide such matters for themselves, and the
members of those communities were implacably
hostile to altering the racial orthodoxy
of their region. This stubborn resistance
again transformed the South into a battleground,
with Congress, the Supreme Court,
and federal troops intervening to pressure
entrenched interests to make concessions.

It is among the great misfortunes of American
history that the apology for slavery and
segregation twice discredited the Southern
conservative tradition. “In another fifty
years,” predicted Robert Hazel, “there will
be no South as we have known it” (179). His
prophecy could not have been more accurate.
The rising generation of Southerners for
the most part knows nothing of leisure, hospitality,
piety, good manners, the attachment to
family and place, the philosophic habit of
mind, the joy of contemplation, or the art of
gracious living. Worse still, they are unfamiliar
with the ideal of the gentleman, which
requires a concern for others before the self
and the sacrifice of happiness to duty. That the
Southern conservative tradition was self-serving,
that it faced the persistent temptation to
misunderstand itself and become an ideology,
may be taken for granted. Ambiguities and
contradictions aside, the Southern conservative
tradition, by a heroic act of mind, may yet
be summoned against the distortions of modernity,
and, in particular, against the alluring
gnostic supposition, now so prevalent, that
men can alter the nature of existence and
transmute the substance of being.

At a time of rising national glory, confidence,
and strength, the authors of The
Lasting South challenged the American dogma
of inexorable progress and unalloyed righteousness.
They loathed the impersonal and
irresponsible bureaucracies that had come to
administer and regulate modern society. They
warned of the reaction that an imperious and
self-congratulatory foreign policy was sure
to inspire among peoples around the world
determined “to avoid Americanization” (44).
They glimpsed the deterioration of American
cities that has since led to urban squalor.
They inveighed against a materialism that
has produced a staggering consumer debt
and has created the aura of impermanence
that envelops all the things that credit can
buy. They reproved the ardor for promiscuous
growth that has despoiled not only the
earth but also the mind, body, and spirit.
They decried the moral and intellectual superficiality
that Americans commonly mistook
for innocence. They sought, finally, to
break the spell that wealth and power had cast
over the United States, reminding their
compatriots, North and South, that the nature
of man had long rendered barren all
hope of establishing a heaven on earth, even
in America.

NOTES

1. Louis D. Rubin Jr., “An Image of the South,” in Louis
   D. Rubin Jr and James Jackson Kilpatrick, eds., The
   Lasting South: Fourteen Southerners Look at Their Home
   (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1957),
2. Further
   references to this book will be given parenthetically in
   the text. 2. William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man
   (Garden City, NY, 1957), 435.
3. David Riesman, with
   Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd
   (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), 24.
4. Vance
   Packard to Kennett Rawson, January 25, 1957, Vance
   Packard Papers, Rare Books and Special Collections,
   Pennsylvania State University Library.
5. Richard M.
   Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of
   Chicago Press, 1948), 113.
6. Louis Hartz, The Liberal
   Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace
   Jovanovich Publishers, 1955), 3-32, 145-58, 167-72, 187-
   89. See also Lionel Trilling, “Preface,” The Liberal
   Imagination (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books,
   1953 [1950]), 5: “In the United States at this time liberalism
   is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual
   tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are
   no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”

7. George C. Rogers Jr, “Foreign Policy and the
   South,” in Clyde N. Wilson, ed., Why the South Will
   Survive (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1981),
   89.