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How the South Won (This) Civil War
Still, something deep and basic has changed in our country. After watching the recent, excellent (despite some historical inaccuracies) series "John Adams" on HBO, I dipped back into the Adams-Jefferson letters. Two things occurred to me: one, party politics was just as vicious back then, in its earliest days, as it is today. Nothing new there. What does seem foreign to us today is the dedication to free thought and, even more, free moral choice that so dominated the correspondence between those two great minds. When Jefferson, in his letter of May 5, 1817, condemned the "den of the priesthood" and "protestant popedom" represented by Massachusetts' state-supported church, he was speaking for both of them—the North and South poles of the revolution. Yet John McCain, even with the GOP nomination in hand, would never dare repeat his brave but politically foolhardy condemnation of the religious right in 2000 as "agents of intolerance." Why? Because we have become an intolerant nation, and that's what gets you elected.
Another expert on the mores of the South, author Michael Lind, notes this change is also attributable to the rise of the mass media and the eclipsing of the patrician culture that produced both Adams amd Jefferson. "Both the New England Yankee and the old Southern colonel are gone," he says. "It's a battle between folk cultures, and it seems the Jacksonian is the more dominant." It's not a clear-cut victory, but the South has won the day.
Author's Note: When I wrote this column last week, I used some careless language to describe certain tendencies in Southern and frontier thinking. When I wrote that after the settlement of the South and frontier by Scots-Irish immigrants, "a substantial portion of the new nation developed, over many generations, a rather savage, unsophisticated set of mores," I didn't mean to say that these tendencies described any particular ethnic group today, or that such mores are representative in general of the thinking of people in the South or West, only that they had emerged historically among some subsections of the population as part of the Jacksonian warrior culture in those regions—Michael Hirsh, May 1, 2008
© 2008
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Member Comments
Posted By: cethsouth @ 05/02/2008 10:24:11 AM
Comment: Another elitist easterner lamenting an old southern stereotype. I'm a Tennessean and spend a great deal of time in New York, especially Long Island. Since Mr. Hirsh obviously took a great deal of time and care writing about southern stereotypes, I'd like to spend a small amount of time describing actual observations from the "enlightened" northeast. Almost everytime I'd venture out into local businesses, invariably there would be a patron being rude, and sometimes, downright abusive, to the clerk or even another patron. The arguments that ensued were filled with four letter words and were loud, uncivilized, ridiculous, and embarrassing. The impatient patron would then get into their Mercedes and finally go. I've lived in Tennessee all my life and have not had to endure such a spectacle in public at any time. Our values and upbringing do not generally permit rudeness, being impolite, disrespectful, boasting, or making a public spectacle of yourself. My southern values do not repect any person that is pretentious and unsubstantial while persuming to pass judgement - especially when that indiviual stereotypes us all. I submit, with all due respect to Mr. Hirsh, that it is the cities that have devolved into a culturally decadent and uncivil tone. To stand there and pretend to be sophisticated when you can't even maintain civil discourse illustrates the point. This article does a disservice to the fair people who live in rual or suburban setttings. All southerners know that northeasterners repeatedly mistake pretense for substance, and polish for intelligence. Being ill-mannered, impolite, selfish and disrespectful seems to be the norm in northeastern culture. How did their culture develop in this way? Maybe Mr. Hirsh can analyze this degeneration and "enlighten" himself and his neighbors to take a look in the mirror before presuming to assess a culture that he knows far less about.
Posted By: garren_bagley@yahoo.com @ 05/01/2008 1:56:53 PM
Comment: Pretentious prig.
Posted By: garren_bagley@yahoo.com @ 05/01/2008 1:54:46 PM
Comment: What a pretentious prig.