The Allure of the Lost Cause

Taking a course on the South is actually pretty eye opening to me.  As a "southerner," if I can be called one for just living in the South my entire life... I've never been wholly attracted to the history of the area... for various personal reasons.  When you live in a racially split and charged area where people still cite violence against African Americans as acceptable and there are marks of the world of Jim Crow a few miles from your house etched in marble with a statement blaring "Colored Only"... I don't know... I just didn't want to learn about it because I didn't think  it was a flattering or good thing to remember.

That was before I decided to be a historian and before I truly understood that all history is important, even ugly history.

I'm reading a book written in the 1930s on the South called Mind of the South and as a historian I have a few problems with it... lack of sources, the kind of lack of any other voice besides that of a white male perspective, but I do understand its time frame and I do get that the author had some important and vital things to say... but I HATE romanticizing the South.

I guess it is because when we romanticize, even when we attempt to tell the truth alongside the romantic viewpoint, things begin to blur and the realities kind of give way to picturesque landscapes and these simpler times where things were relatively different and enveloped in this lavender haze that reminds me of some sort of foreboding fairy tale fog.  

Cash writes like a novelist and oddly enough, before he hung himself in a hotel, he was supposed to be working on his epic novel about the South... and I think the language in his book is more suited for it.  While I get the setup, making people understand why Southerners in the Old South behaved the way they did... I think making the South this mystical land where it was easy to lose yourself and get caught up in the fantasy and have an almost antagonistic relationship with reality... I think it was also just as plausible that rich people knew how to remain rich and maintain their lifestyle and dupe poor people... the simple, almost primitive in Cash's mind "cracker" into doing what was necessary to maintain the way things were.  

I'm not bashing Cash, far from it... I think the book is important, remains relevant when studying the South, and makes a lot of statements that needed to be made during that period right before WWII and a few years from the emergence of the Civil Rights movement, but his language lends to the myth of a more innocent time when I do not believe historically we should look at it that way....
Perhaps it is because unlike Cash who was a journalist by trade and admittedly did not research his topic as thorough as some other works I've read, wrote a book more from the heart than from a sterile academic viewpoint.  As a southerner, the same sort of emotions cause me to have an automatic bias against anything that writes about the antebellum period in a favorable light is the emotion that causes Cash to write the truth as he saw it, but to also do it in a pseudo-sympathetic way, its just my emotional response is the opposite.   Also, I've done scholarly research from the Colonial era up to the 1960s now and enough to dispose of the romantic language for whatever reason and document it in a more sterile manner.  

The truth is... I don't know.  Like I said, I don't mind the book at all, I think it is rather well written and has a lot of important things to say even if he lacks footnotes, end notes, and his sources are few and scattered in between his on the porch in a rocking chair style....  I think I just need to get over my own prejudices against the subject and be more open minded and understand that just because cash writes in this romantic manner does not in any way mean he endorsed the sentiment or the behaviors of the Old South.   I'm not done with the book and I have to say I enjoy it... but the language did get to me for a moment and I had to take a step back.