Great column from 01-09-05 Mobile Register...

...that, unfortunately is not on their website.


An Endangered Species
By Clay Risen


Every year, just before Thanksgiving, I head down to Fairhope, Alabama. It doesn't take much to get me to make the trip; for my money, there are few places more beautiful than this sleepy town on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay.

But, my stated purpose is to attend Southern Writers Reading, a weekend klatch of panels, readings and parties that draws many of the region's poets, novelists and fans. It's a great time, full of intelligent conversations with friendly, warm-hearted people.

For a southern expatriate like myself--I grew up in Nashville--it's something of a curative, a nice change from the hustle of Washington journalism. But it's also a reminder that the South, so often disparaged as a backward, inbred land, is also home to a rich and varied intellectual culture.

I needed that reminder even more this time. Driving through Alabama, I saw countless signs denouncing an amendment that would have removed racist language from the state constitution; the proposal lost narrowly on Nov. 2 and, a few weeks later, a recount confirmed that result.

Apologists say that the amendment failed because it would have removed a line in the constitution that rejects the right to an education, and the state Christian Coalition warned that the nefarious "right to education" movement would use the amendment to increase taxes to fund more schools and teachers. How this makes the outcome any less reprehensible is beyond me, but it seems to have assuaged the good folks of Alabama.

Such debacles highlight the plight of the white Southern liberal. On one hand, you love your region in a way that other Americans can't understand. But you are also deeply shamed by its unwillingness to move forward on social issues.

Such shame is a big reason why I don't move back, and why thousands of other Southern liberals decamp annually for more enlightened locales.

But, my disaffection is different from the disdain for the South felt by, say, New York liberals. As the journalist W. J. Cash wrote in 1941, it is "the exasperated hate of a lover who cannot persuade the object of his affections to his desire."

And so I and others are torn--Southern Writers Reading vs. racist state constitutions.

It's hard, looking at the region's deep red hue, to remember that, until the 1960s, there was a clear, liberal (as opposed to merely Democratic) streak running through the region's middle class.

These days, white Southern liberals tend to be either transplants or cosmopolitans, people who grew up in either Atlanta or Nashville and therefore have easy access to competing political ideas. But the middle-class liberalism of the mid-20th century was different.

Relatively isolated from national intellectual currents, it grew from a mix of Christian and classical philosophy, catalyzed by a disaffection with the region's aristocratic mythologies and an abiding sense of guilt over its recent, horrible past.

Think of Cordell Hull, an FDR brain-truster and Nobel Peace laureate, or Estes Kefauver, an early civil rights advocate and Adlai Stevenson's 1956 running mate. Both started life as Tennessee farm boys. Renowned historian (and New Republic contributing editor) C. Vann Woodward grew up in rural Arkansas.

Or consider the characters that populate the novels of the Southern renaissance: Faulkner's Gavin Stevens went off to school at Harvard and Heidelberg, while the men in James Agee's "A Death in the Family" are devoted New Republic readers.

Mid-century Southern liberals saw racial justice not as a philosophical problem but as a concrete ill that needed immediate redress.

But they also understood that the solutions, should they ever come, would be neither simple nor painless, because reactionary, know-nothing whites--embodied by Faulkner's infamous anti-heroes, the Snopeses--would fight violently to stop them.

They opposed Jim Crow (some loudly, others not loudly enough), but their beliefs ultimately proved too fragile to survive the civil rights tumult.

The older generation of liberals--the Hulls and Kefauvers--were dying off while the younger generation, radicalized by racial politics, was leaving the South in disgust. And many of those who stayed were seduced by the constant stream of anti-liberalism emanating from everyone from George Wallace to Lynyrd Skynyrd.

As Walker Percy wrote in 1965, "Ten years of indoctrination by the Citizens' Councils, racist politicians and the most one-sided press north of Cuba has produced a generation of good-looking and ferocious young bigots."

By the late '60s, liberalism had suffered a mighty blow nationwide. In the South, it never recovered. White Southern liberals still exist, but they are too rarely a viable political or social presence, particularly in the Deep South of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina and rural Georgia.

Back home in Nashville, I had lunch with one such rarity. David Carlton is a history professor at Vanderbilt University (and a Presbyterian church elder) who grew up in a South Carolina mill town before escaping north to Amherst. But he was drawn back, both by his intellectual pursuits and his regional pinings.

Over sandwiches and coffee, he foretold of dark times. "I don't believe the political realignment of the region is complete yet," he said. "What appears to be an increasingly toxic blend of traditional conservatism and 'Christian' moralism continues to gain strength."

I heard Carlton's pessimism repeated in conversations throughout my trip.

The fear is not simply that Republicans will continue to control the vast majority of the region's political offices; conservatism, as it is conventionally understood, tends not to draw the same ire from Southern liberals as it does nationally.

Rather, it's that things like the Alabama amendment vote or the recent flap over anti-evolution disclaimers affixed to Cobb County, Ga. textbooks show the powerful grip that religiously charged, anti-enlightenment conservatism has on the region, and that, without the moderating voice that region's liberals once presented, these forces will eventually roll back even the modest social gains made during the heyday of Southern liberalism.

In 1965, Percy wrote that "to use Faulkner's personae, the Gavin Stevenses have disappeared and the Snopeses have won."

The plight of the Southern liberal is that, 40 years later, Percy's conclusion is more, not less, accurate.

And I am proud to be a liberal!

Nice article, thanks for posting.

Still, there's got to be some way out of this mess.

Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will

It's nice to hear from someone who understands the conflicts of the Southern liberal.