THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 5, 1995 TAG: 9511040001
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Long : 120 lines
Something called the ``Southern League'' was founded in Tuscaloosa, Ala., last year and now insists on announcing itself. In an op-ed piece in The Washington Post, Michael Hill, a history professor, and Thomas Fleming, a magazine editor, run on about a South that has been persecuted, ridiculed and robbed of much of its cultural heritage.
They complain - seriously, it appears - that Southerners ``are almost uniformly portrayed'' as a ``blight on the American landscape,'' and inveigh vaguely against Northern intellectuals who've allegedly rewritten Southern history and brainwashed generations of Southern students to believe that slavery tainted their moral inheritance.
More Confederate banners flying over factories and schools would comfort Southern Leaguers. But mostly these ``scholars, journalists and political activists'' want for Southerners the right ``to be let alone to mind our own business, to rear our own children and to say our own prayers in the buildings built with our own money.'' They cry for separateness and home rule.
Well, now: The South has had its share of aloneness - generations of it extending from the Civil War to the New Deal and even after. The cultural legacy was scant and in many ways ugly. Politics incited poor whites against blacks; dissent could be dangerous to livelihood or health. A law against lynching was needed in Virginia and more so elsewhere in a region short of food, clothing, housing, medicine, schoolbooks and suffrage.
This South, indeed, was thought backward and eccentric; visitors above the Mason-Dixon were regarded quizzically and sometimes asked to ``say something Southern.''
If all this was long ago, it's worth acknowledgment by Southern Leaguers who lament a loss of peculiarity and gripe that a subverted South gets no respect.
Where have these people been? As their manifesto was being published in the nation's capital, a baseball team owned by a media tycoon who started out in the billboard business was winning the World Series in a Southern city that will be host to the Olympics. Seated in the ballpark with the former billboard guy and his movie-star wife was a former U.S. president, one of three Southerners elected to that office in the past 30 years. Perhaps they drank a Coke, the old Georgia ``dope'' that has become the leading bellywash in the big, wide world. The same city produced the female author of the world's best-known novel, and a minister who won a Nobel Prize for marching over the battlements of segregation that laws of Congress and courts could not breach.
The paranoid South presented by the Southern League needs to be laid to rest. Poor-mouthing and pouting about old slights hardly befits a region in political and economic ascendancy. Sun Belt attraction of factories and jobs for other regions and nations is well-known; by now perhaps it has cost the South the distinction of being the used-car capital of the country.
As for politics, the levers of power are in the hands of Newt Gingrich, a Georgian, who is enacting a national agenda and helping to reconstitute the solid South in the Republican column. Lee Atwater, still another Georgian, saw this ``revolution'' coming: not, he said, because the South was becoming more like the nation but because the ``rest of the country was becoming more like the South.''
Whether or not this is a compliment to either side depends on whether revolution works to strengthen the weak - an end achieved in the South by New Dealers who Southern Leaguers view as meddling outsiders and cultural usurpers.Something called the ``Southern League'' was founded in Tuscaloosa, Ala., last year and now insists on announcing itself. In an op-ed piece in The Washington Post, Michael Hill, a history professor, and Thomas Fleming, a magazine editor, run on about a South that has been persecuted, ridiculed and robbed of much of its cultural heritage.
They complain - seriously, it appears - that Southerners ``are almost uniformly portrayed'' as a ``blight on the American landscape,'' and inveigh vaguely against Northern intellectuals who've allegedly rewritten Southern history and brainwashed generations of Southern students to believe that slavery tainted their moral inheritance.
More Confederate banners flying over factories and schools would comfort Southern Leaguers. But mostly these ``scholars, journalists and political activists'' want for Southerners the right ``to be let alone to mind our own business, to rear our own children and to say our own prayers in the buildings built with our own money.'' They cry for separateness and home rule.
Well, now: The South has had its share of aloneness - generations of it extending from the Civil War to the New Deal and even after. The cultural legacy was scant and in many ways ugly. Politics incited poor whites against blacks; dissent could be dangerous to livelihood or health. A law against lynching was needed in Virginia and more so elsewhere in a region short of food, clothing, housing, medicine, schoolbooks and suffrage.
This South, indeed, was thought backward and eccentric; visitors above the Mason-Dixon were regarded quizzically and sometimes asked to ``say something Southern.''
If all this was long ago, it's worth acknowledgment by Southern Leaguers who lament a loss of peculiarity and gripe that a subverted South gets no respect.
Where have these people been? As their manifesto was being published in the nation's capital, a baseball team owned by a media tycoon who started out in the billboard business was winning the World Series in a Southern city that will be host to the Olympics. Seated in the ballpark with the former billboard guy and his movie-star wife was a former U.S. president, one of three Southerners elected to that office in the past 30 years. Perhaps they drank a Coke, the old Georgia ``dope'' that has become the leading bellywash in the big, wide world. The same city produced the female author of the world's best-known novel, and a minister who won a Nobel Prize for marching over the battlements of segregation that laws of Congress and courts could not breach.
The paranoid South presented by the Southern League needs to be laid to rest. Poor-mouthing and pouting about old slights hardly befits a region in political and economic ascendancy. Sun Belt attraction of factories and jobs for other regions and nations is well-known; by now perhaps it has cost the South the distinction of being the used-car capital of the country.
As for politics, the levers of power are in the hands of Newt Gingrich, a Georgian, who is enacting a national agenda and helping to reconstitute the solid South in the Republican column. Georgia-born Lee Atwater saw this ``revolution'' coming: not, he said, because the South was becoming more like the nation but because the ``rest of the country was becoming more like the South.''
Whether or not this is a compliment to either side depends on whether the revolution works to strengthen the weak - an end achieved in the South by New Dealers who Southern Leaguers view as meddling outsiders and cultural usurpers. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot.Mr. Morgan is a
former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot.
by CNB