THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 7, 1996 TAG: 9601110543
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JAMES E. PERSON JR.
LENGTH: Medium: 97 lines
THE NEW SOUTH, 1945-1980
The Story of the South's Modernization
NUMAN V. BARTLEY
Louisiana State University Press. 548 pp. $39.95.
``It is out of fashion in these days to look backward rather than forward,'' wrote John Crowe Ransom, an Agrarian, in 1930. ``About the only American given to it is some unreconstructed Southerner, who persists in his regard for a certain terrain, a certain history, and a certain inherited way of living.''
By 1930 the South stood at the threshold of change. From the time of Appomattox until the eve of the Great Depression, the South had been a distinctive agricultural nation within a larger urban nation, possessing a culture - with an idiom, a literature, a diet, mores and a sense of irony, humor and tragedy - quite alien to continental American culture at large. Now the region prepared to meld with the rest of the United States, becoming a land of large cities and agribusiness, and to repudiate its heritage as a long, sordid exercise in sentimentalism, impracticality and racist visciousness. Getting and spending would become the sole end in life in the glorious New South.
Written as a contribution to the 60-year-old series of volumes published under the Littlefield Fund for Southern History of the University of Texas, The New South, 1945-1980 forms Volume XI of a larger work, A History of the South. It is a massively, but effectively, documented history of the cultural shift foreseen by the Agrarians.
During the late 1930s, the Roosevelt Administration described the Depression-stricken South as ``the Nation's No. 1 economic problem'' - an ironic comment, since FDR's economic policies had arguably made it more profitable for large landowners to leave their fields fallow (and be paid by the U.S. government) than to retain and pay hardworking sharecroppers to farm the land. World War II lifted the nation's economy as a whole, and brought the South out of widespread poverty into the modern age - not in economic terms alone, but in terms of politics, music and race relations as well, with thousands of determined black GIs resettling in the South after the war.
Drawing upon a wealth of reports and other source documents - including works of fiction published by the likes of Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker and William Faulkner - Bartley dispassionately details how postwar Southerners attempted to cope with the coming changes in their lives, changes wrought by the new prosperity and the coming confrontation of African Americans with Jim Crow and the educational legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson (``separate but equal''). Bartley continues by describing the golden age of the civil rights movement, and changes in Southern politics from a widespread ``boss'' system to a more municipal-focused system, one not without its own faults.
The author concludes by documenting how the change from a family-centered culture guided by a sense of place and heritage to one guided by pragmatic achievement, self-fulfillment and economic gain transformed the South. What was once a cultural backwater that ``offered little in the way of equality, and . . . dampened social mobility and unmitigated individualism'' blossomed into a ``far more dynamic'' region, the new policies of which ``broadened opportunities for individuals, undermined racial and gender proscriptions and stimulated individual ambitions.''
Bartley has no ax to grind here. All is presented, for the most part, with a strict attendance to the data and impressions given by the many source documents that he consulted. Occasionally, though, some sense of the author's own thoughts creeps in. Bartley has a great deal of fun depicting the Rev. Billy Graham as something of an opportunistic humbug. Also, one gets the recurrent impression that in Bartley's lexicon, the word ``conservative'' is a polite shorthand term for ``genteel, change-hating, white, racist stick-in-the-mud.''
But with the conservative mind being that which balances resistance to sudden change with the propensity for judicious reform, the change in Southern culture - as evidenced in this book - has been conservative on some fronts, despite the fevered buffooneries of certain mid-century white Southern politicians that led to bloodshed and jarring cultural alteration.
One lays down Bartley's ambitious volume satisfied that much useful knowledge has been conveyed and a region's history made clearer by the author's efforts. There remains only one disquieting note, and that is the lingering question of whether any man or woman, cut loose from his or her roots in family and place, whose primary preoccupation and sense of fulfillment lies with the cash nexus, has truly advanced culturally.
``The Southern idea today is down, and the progressive or American idea is up,'' wrote John Crowe Ransom in 1930, in words just as applicable in the late 20th century.
The American idea will remain up for some time, by all appearances. Bartley has effectively charted that rise in a work that is a valuable contribution to one's understanding of modern Southern life, in all its shades of darkness and light. MEMO: James E. Person Jr., a native of Virginia who now lives in Michigan, is
the editor of ``The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor of Russell
Kirk.'' by CNB