Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity Book

Eric Bates of Southern Exposure magazine said, "The fascination with things southern is the biggest craze since miniature golf." As a northerner who lives in Virginia I saw myself in the book Away Down South . If you live in the South or consider yourself fairly learned about the South, your main criticism may be about what is left out of the book. This may be one of the problems with any history textbook. However, I found references to many, many books (literature and text) in Away Down South that I will be adding to my bookshelf and reading in the future. The author, James C. Cobb, has stimulated my interest in finding out about the South, the region where I live.

There is talk about the homogenization of the South as it is slowly drawn into the melting pot that is the United States. There is talk of the lore and legend that makes up part of the pseudo-history of the South. This book, of course, has a point of view and it is that of the author. I am not sure if he is more embarrassed or entertained by what he has discovered in his academic research. I believe that there is no history book that is outside of and free from politics. You really have to know something about the author these days to have a fighting chance at understanding her or his book. Here are a few links to pages about and by Mr. Cobb:





And here is a 2010 article by Mr. Cobb in the NY Times with over 140 comments:


And, just for fun, here is a blog by the same Mr. Cobb:


If you haven't had enough yet, here is a scholarly article by Mr. Cobb:


If you want more, you will have to Google "James C. Cobb" yourself!

Many pages of Away Down Southare devoted to how slavery, race and racism have worked to help mold the southern identity. Cobb would put these topics at the top of his list. While you probably won't be shocked by that conclusion, you might benefit from reading the pros and cons on the topic found throughout the book. Although he does not always succeed, I think Cobb does try to show both sides. I think he might say that he is not so much taking his own position but illuminating the positions of others. I love how so many of the observations about the attitudes of the day are traced through the southern literature at that time.

I am a Southerner by residence only. I lived the first thirty years of my life in Michigan. Then I moved to Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland and Virginia again. I have lived in Virginia for ten years and am still trying to understand what it means to me to be in the South. I live in Lynchburg, Virginia, a town with a distressing name if you don't know that a Mr. Lynch founded the town. Rather than accept integration in the 1960s, Lynchburg filled in the public swimming pool with dirt rather than integrate it. And you still hear some blacks mourn the loss of the "separate but equal" school system since the black schools were, they recall, a source of pride and community.

I have conjured up a slower pace of life in Virginia although it may be a stereotype that I have fallen for. The most obvious distinction is a comparison with New York where the people even talk fast when compared with Virginia. I identify the South by its racial and racist history. But it is true, as I have been told many times, that racism is not limited to the South. I think there is a greater difference between country people and urban people than between Northerners and Southerners. As I read Away Down South I thought about my experience living in a country where there is still a Dixie and there is a strong belief that the South is different from the rest of the country. The South still bears the albatross of racial division and while it is true that racism is still rampant throughout the country, the South is still branded with that mark more than anyplace else.

This is a textbook so it is crammed with information and footnotes ascribing its accuracy. It also implicitly acknowledges that this book is one version of reality and that we have been misled by history books in the past. I suggest that you read the chapters that sound interesting to you as an introduction to the book. I mostly read it in the order in which it was printed. For me that meant it started out slow and then built up interest and excitement. If I had dipped into the book in different places, I may have been more receptive to the initial chapters once I got back to them.

The author begins with the premise that the identity of The South is based as much as what it is NOT as what it is. And that oppositional view has most typically boiled down to a discussion of the differences between The North and The South. Simply put, there would not be a South without a North.
. . . the reader who picks up this book looking for a definitive pronouncement as to whether "the South" still exists as a distinctive region is destined to put it down disappointed. . . . I hasten to point out that what I am offering here is a history rather than the history of southern identity. I make no claim that what I have done is totally inclusive or definitive. On the other hand, I do believe this book offers a useful chronologically comprehensive historical framework for understanding the origins and evolution of an ongoing effort, now into its third century, to come to terms with the South's role as both a real and imagined cultural entity separate and distinct from the rest of the country. Because southern distinctiveness has so often been defined in opposition to our larger national self-image, this enduring struggle with southern identity has actually become not only a sustaining component of southern identity itself, but as we shall see, of American identity as well.
A southern identity is probably most vividly established by the years when slavery was permitted in some states and not in others. The presence of legally sanctioned permanent ownership and control of one person by another predominated in what we call the southern states.
It is also advanced that settlers of the South and North were of different heritages:
In the 1830s writers eager to explain why the inhabitants of the northern states and those of the southern states appeared to be so different in values and temperament had begun to seize on the idea that the people of the two regions were simply heirs to the dramatically different class, religious, cultural, and political traditions delineated by the English Civil War. The northern states were populated, so many believed, by the descendants of the middle-class Puritan "Roundheads" who had routed the defenders of the monarchy, the aristocratic Cavaliers, supposedly of Norman descent, who had then settled in the southern states.
Cobb has included copious notes (50 pages) to indicate his sources that substantiate his conclusions or elucidate the conclusions of others. There is a good deal of material that is presented as factual based on these footnotes. There are many unique sources of data. This is impressive on its face but I was limited in my ability to utilize this information as it required significant referencing and recollection from page to page. One must assume that the footnotes accurately reflect the sources since the casual reader will not validate the information personally. There is clearly the appearance of academic rigor in the material. The value of significant but selected detail will have to be determined by the individual reader.
A GR reader who is a native southerner and has displayed significant knowledge and experience related to the South, Mike Sullivan, has shared his dislike for this book in his review.
I expected Dr. Cobb to be a cogent, story telling Southerner. What I got was dry, repetitive, incomplete, and a jumble of facts flying fast and furiously.
. . .
Bottom line, Cobb presents little that is positive about the South.
I think it would be fair to say that Mr. Sullivan was unimpressed by what purports to be a scholarly effort. I point this out because of my respect for him as a skilled reader. His opinion of the book runs contrary to other ratings. However, there are no other substantial reviews so I wanted to direct your attention to his thoughts. My own negative feelings about the book are due, in most part, to the fact that it shares many of the negative characteristics many textbooks: it is not always easy to read and understand. Mr. Sullivan felt that Mr. Cobb was talking down to him. I can understand that given Mr. Sullivan's significant knowledge. As a less knowledgeable person, I did not experience that feeling. Mr. Sullivan was possibly more distressed by what was left out of the book than by what was included. You can go and read his review yourself and I recommend that you do: . As with most good reviews, there are a number of good comments that follow it.

This book is not well read within the GR community. At this time it is the monthly read of a GR group with over three hundred members. Approximately a half dozen GR people in the group are currently reading it. This is 2% of the group. Not impressive to me. People are mostly passing on this book. A past GR review humorously reads: "Insightful I guess, but why did I read this?? When you get out of college no one is forcing you anymore..."

In Chapter 2, "The South Becomes a Cause," Cobb says that Reconstruction after the Civil War did more to unify the South than the war.
After four years of common struggle against the North, they not only responded to the term "Southern" with an emotion once reserved for Virginia or Carolina or Georgia, but they were much more acutely conscious "of the line that divided what was Southern from what was not."
. . .
…"the South was born for a great many white Southerners not in Montgomery or even in Charleston harbor, but, as Robert Penn Warren observed, "only at the moment when Lee handed Grant his sword" at Appomattox, and it was only thereafter that the "conception of Southern identity truly bloomed."
The post-war subjugation of the South by the Yankees worked to unite against a common enemy who would yet be defeated. They saw the rising of the South out of the ashes of the Civil War and Reconstruction. No matter, Cobb says, that much of the "history" of that period is not accurate and would be better referred to as myths.
Cobb observes that the New South reconstructed the history of the Old South to a time of happy slaves who willingly protected their owners and well disciplined soldiers who were defending their homeland. This has to be a standard, almost expected debate among historians: what really happened?
In its southern translation, as first popularized in Edward A. Pollard's 1866 book The Lost Cause , the "Lost Cause" ethos not only defended succession and glorified the society that white southerners had gone to war to preserve, but actually transformed their tragic military defeat in a tremendous moral triumph. As Emory M. Thomas explained, "The Lost Cause mythology held that the southern cause was not only undefiled by defeat but that the bloodbath of war actually sanctified the values and mores of the Old South." Proponents of the Lost Cause quickly pieced together a remarkably seamless historical justification of the actions of southern whites before and during the war. Though foisted on the South by the British with the assistance of northern slavetraders, in the hands of southern planters, slavery had actually been a benign, civilizing institution. Furthermore, the South's antebellum planter aristocrats had supported succession not to preserve slavery but to secure nothing more than the individual and state rights granted by the Constitution. (62)
This is exactly the historical debate that I remember from my school days many years ago and that still goes on today: the South went to war to defend state rights and not slavery. True or False? Cobb refers to the audacity of the revisionism.
One of the most enduring myths to emerge from the era of Abraham Lincoln is the notion that the South fought the Civil War not to defend slavery, but to uphold the rights of states against a tyrannical central government. This myth was extremely important to the white South's resistance to post-war Reconstruction, particular the effort by northern Republicans to secure basic civil rights and liberties for newly freed slaves. This states' rights doctrine took concrete form during Reconstruction in the enactment of black codes by Southern states that sharply limited the freedom of African Americans.
Source:
Cobb considers the views of southern authors, black and white, as they advance their views about the south in their novels and other writings and especially about race relations. A variety of views about the Jim Crow south are put forward. There is a white objection to segregation being overturned by force by the federal government. The common view the white authors discussed was that southerners should be permitted to bring about integration without outside interference and on their own terms.

Richard Wright's Black Boy published in 1945 is one example of a black southern author:
In Black Boy Wright had forced white readers "to consider the South from the black point of view." Not surprisingly, many of them rejected what they saw. Mississippi's race-baiting congressmen Theodore G. Bilbo and John Rankin denounced Black Boy as "a damnable lie from beginning to end" and the "dirtiest, filthiest, lousiest, most obscene piece of writing that I have ever seen in print," pointing out that "it comes from a Negro and you cannot expect any better from a person of this type." Some white liberals and a great many black leaders were also displeased with Wright's unflinching portrayal of the intellectual and emotional barrenness of black life in the South and his suggestion that there was little reason to think things were getting better.

Zora Neale Hurston was another well-known black southern author. She was considered too conservative by some of her peers:
The irreverent novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston had drawn consistent criticism from other black intellectuals for refusing to use her writings as a weapon in the struggle against racism and Jim Crow. Yet, in the original manuscript for her autobiographical Dust Tracks on a Road, she pointed out that "President Roosevelt could extend his four freedoms to some people right here in America. . . . I am not bitter, but I see what I see. . . . I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her." Like several others, this passage was subsequently excised after Hurston's white editor deemed it "irrelevant." Elsewhere, Hurston notes Roosevelt's reference to the United States as "the arsenal of democracy" and wondered if she had heard him correctly. Perhaps he meant "arse-in-all" of democracy, she thought, since the United States was supporting the French in their effort to resubjugate the Indo-Chinese, suggesting that the "ass-and-all of democracy has shouldered the load of subjugating the dark world completely." Hurston also announced that she was "crazy for this democracy" and would "pitch headlong into the thing" if it were not for the numerous Jim Crow laws that confronted her at every turn.
Cobb highlights two books written by influential white southerners that shined a not so positive light on the south:
From its investigation of the Southern class system to its pioneering assessments of the region's legacies of racism, religiosity, and romanticism, W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South defined the way in which millions of readers -- on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line -- would see the South for decades to come.
The South and the Southerner was published in 1963:
A wide-ranging blend of autobiography and history, The South and the Southerner is one prominent newspaperman's statement on his region, its heritage, its future, and his own place within it. Ralph McGill (1898-1969), the longtime editor and later publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, was one of a handful of progressive voices heard in southern journalism during the civil rights era. From the podium of his front-page columns, he delivered stinging criticisms of ingrained southern bigotry and the forces marshaled against change; yet he retained throughout his career--and his writing--a deep affection for all southerners, even those who declared themselves his enemies.
In the chapter titled "The South of Guilt and Shame" Cobb summarizes the efforts of some white southern historians to overcome the commonly accepted southern myth of the Old South in which slavery was seen as a civilizing experience for the slaves. Newly scrutinized, the commonly accepted myths about the severe damage done to the south by the reconstruction period after the Civil War are debunked. He makes reference to the book Reconstruction after the Civil War that shattered the accepted history of the south.
In the same chapter, the southern literary stars are briefly examined including Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, William Alexander Percy, Elizabeth Spencer and Robert Penn Warren.
Where Spencer, Welty, and Percy had simply moved from tacit acceptance to public criticism of segregation, in 1930 at age twenty-four, Robert Penn Warren had actually gone on record in its defense.
Warren later wrote Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South in which he "chronicled the traumatic and bitter 'inner conflict' raging among white southerners as a group and within them as individuals." In 1942, Warren left the South and did not return.

CONTINUED IN COMMENTS SECTION I've never seen this happen!