While I am still reading about the South in the American Revolution, I am also working on a follow up speech to Blood and Soil: How Southerners Became a Separate and Distinct People.
The great watershed moment in Southern history wasn’t the 1860s. It was the 1940s when the South emerged from 75 years of colonial rule by the East which had triumphed in the War Between the States. Before the 1940s, the South was a vast rural world dominated by plantation agriculture. By the 1960s, the South was becoming urbanized, industrialized and Americanized.
Who were we before this transformation? What were our distinct Southern values before we were overrun by the interstates, the suburbs and McDonald’s and Wal-Marts?
The following excerpt comes from Numan V. Brantley’s book The New South, 1945-1980:
“The heartland of the old regime was the great plantation belt spreading from Southside Virginia into eastern Texas. There the descendants of slaves were a substantial percentage of the population and a larger percentage of the labor force. The ghosts of the antebellum aristocracy haunted the land, and planters usually stood near the top of the social order. The planter class and its county-seat allies had led the South into secession, turned back the Reconstruction experiment, defeated the Populists in the 1890s, disenfranchised the masses of southern voters, and established the conventions that ruled southern public life. …
The elite of the county seats and larger countryside towns were the primary champions of lost-cause mythology, white supremacy, plantation labor relations, and a status-based social order, all of which were part of a broader paternalism. County elites, Shannon noted, held to a “feudal” ideology that “conceives of each man belonging to an hierarchical order of inequality in which his peculiar faculties equip him to perform a unique role in some part of the hierarchy.” Gunnar Mrydal similarly commented on the conservative preference for a “social order which established an ideal division of labor and of responsibility in society between the sexes, the age groups, the social classes and the two races.” A closely knit family with obligations and duties, authority and submission, and rights and responsibilities according to each member’s position within it came close to being the ideal model for a society.”
Sounds horrifying!
Imagine a world in which men are still men and women are still women, where husbands still have authority over their households, where parents have authority over their children and in which “free love” is perceived as a menacing evil because sex outside of marriage is still shameful.
Imagine a world in which we were taught to revere our ancestors and to take pride in our identity and to protect the less fortunate in life and in which a sense of honor and duty governed our conduct. In this world, the negro was excluded from politics and from White social spaces, but his basic rights were protected and race relations were generally more positive than they are today. Instead of trying to make the races equal which is impossible, we focused on economic improvement.
Imagine a world in which our churches were strong, marriage and the family was venerated and our homogeneous folk culture was flourishing. In this world, it was not uncommon for couples to have a dozen children. There was no Jewish garbage being pumped into every household through the television.
What if I told you this world was called white supremacy?
Imagine a world in which most whites are disenfranchised serfs in a feudal system. Oh, (((they))) did that already, didn’t they? It was called the Deep South.
Better yet, imagine a truly new nation.
Sugar cane was introduced by the Moors into Portugal and Spain, then adapted to some islands off Africa in each’s respective territories, mostly by jewish planters. The first ‘europeans’ to enslave africans were these jewish portuguese and spanish conquerors, who not long after took their sugar cane industry to the more fertile environments of South America and the Caribbean.
The Normans of France who went on to conquer England in 1066 and later dominated the settlement of the South of the United States were part jewish or heavily jewish-influenced.
It’s all been jews, from the start of their invasion of Europe with the Romans. The entire campaign to parasite off of european and sub-saharan indigenous peoples has been lead by jews for the benefit of jews.
Hunter >>>>Imagine a world in which we were taught to revere our ancestors and to take pride in our identity and to protect the less fortunate in life and in which a sense of honor and duty governed our conduct…….<<<<
Hunter,
I think you are on the right track. I wish most of your commenters here would say an 'amen' to this post. I could rest much easier if the likes of Ironsides and Richard Spencer could give up their dreams of ethnic cleansing and race wars and adopt your version.
Your 'dream' is medieval. Probably because Dixie was one of the Middle Ages' last gasps. (Dixie and maybe Maximillian's attempt in Mexico…aided by our confederate expatriates like JO. Shelby.)
It is an irrefutable fact that in Antebellum America, most EMANCIPATED blacks preferred to live in Dixie
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/free-blacks-lived-in-the-north-right/
rather than in the north where they were 'loved'..even with the threat of re-enslavement being oft-heard. …
Then, after the War, even in 1900….well into Jim Crow and real race hatred, – and blacks could have up and moved anywhere– but they still just loved living in Dixie.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Census_1900_Percent_Black.png
and nowhere else.
Might I suggest it was not only because they loved the weather?…many loved the Southern Culture, the Southern people– the Christian South, the Bible Belt, even the spiteful, twisted version of the South that emerged after Reconstruction.– some blacks even loved that version more than some Southern Whites did who —as you point out— never knew what they had and then just let it fade away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AirBbS4R7Z0
It’s been 50 years this month since I first heard this great song by Joe South. Still very much appropriate today. One of my all time favorites & always gets me choked up whenever I hear it.
Mr. Wallace,
This and the other article on Jim Crow were fantastically interesting. My grandmother spent several years in the South of the 1950’s and thought it was wonderful. She lived in Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana. She noticed how respectful blacks were and how happy they seemed. She was sure they were not faking. Coming from California and Texas she did think some of the laws were excessive but she never knew anyone to say so.
As a woman she felt safer in the deep South than in Texas where she lived in a Mexican neighborhood next to a negro neighborhood.
Interesting how my grandmother who is more “Mexican” looking than me was considered white in a strict traditional white supremacy time and part of the country yet I am not considered white by current white nationalist standards in America.
How does one explain or understand judaized White Southerners like, say Sam Walton?