Posted on 07/16/2007 1:29:21 PM PDT by Kaput
Is it true what they say about Dixie? by: Mary Kapp, July 12, 2007
Should you notice a disconnect between the southerners that you meet and the American South that you hear about, your personal impressions are probably more accurate than the analysis you may get from media and academic types. “The PC police tell southerners that they have no right to honor their history,” Clint Johnson, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the South (and why it will rise again) says. “Our ancestors were racist, and if we honor them, we are racist too.”
He was a featured speaker at Eagle Forum’s Collegiate conference on June 22. Johnson recalled a New England radio interview in which the talk show host asked, “Why are southerners so uneducated?” Tongue planted firmly in cheek, the author said, “Well, us southerners, you already know, are a bunch of gun-toting, redneck, beer-guzzling, barefoot clansmen who marry their first cousins.”
There may some things you may not know about the South, Johnson points out:
• Famed abolitionist John Brown of Brown University, and a Rhode Island House Representative, was a legendary mogul in the slave trade, and lamented the abolition in print.
• The University of Alabama’s library was burned to the ground by Union soldiers not during, but at the end of the Civil War.
• Southerners comprised a large percentage of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and were a driving force in the creation of the Bill of Rights.
• Patrick Henry, a Virginian, was one of the first to recognize the injustice of taxation without representation. His activism spurred national change.
• Activists in Charlotte, N.C. wrote the Mecklenberg Declaration of Independence on May 20, 1775, which was the first record of a collective desire for American independence.
For Vanderbilt University, the United Daughters of the Confederacy funded the building of the “Vanderbilt Confederate Memorial Hall.” The administration wanted to sandblast the word “Confederate” off of the front of the building, but the $1-million-dollar lawsuit afforded a different outcome. On the Vanderbilt campus map, however, the building is simply referred to as “Memorial Hall.”
Johnson went on to celebrate a characteristically southern culture as portrayed in literature and fine arts, comparably lacking in other regions of America: “There is no New England novel or Midwest musical genre,” said the author.
Virtually every form of distinctive American music originated in the south, said Johnson. Rock and roll, jazz, the blues, and, naturally, country music, all have their foundations from New Orleans to Nashville to southern Florida.
Distinctive literature includes works from William Faulkner, Mark Twain, and Margaret Mitchell.
The primal idea of the strong woman can be seen in the wives of farmers who effectively ran the family plantations. Sally Tompkins started a hospital during the Civil War with the lowest death rates of any American hospital. When Congress observed this, and passed a law that mandated that only army officers can run hospitals, Jefferson Davis made her a captain.
When asked for thoughts on the conclusion of the Civil War, Johnson remarked, “Lincoln’s death was the worst thing for the South. Had he lived, it would have been the best thing.” Johnson went on to describe the effects of integration and the economy in either situation.
When asked to give parting advice to young southern conservatives, Johnson told listeners to “defend your right to learn about and celebrate your history!”
Mary Kapp is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a program run jointly by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, please e-mail mal.kline@academia.org
I’M AFRAID I WOULD HAVE HAD TO PUNCH THAT SOB RIGHT IN THE MOUTH......
And, don’t forget like the Northeastern elites do, that American slavery started in the North and survived there for a very long time. In fact, Nova Scotia was the first and longest existing North American slave port.
The reality is that slavery died in the North first, not from any moral consideration, but because of the shift there from agrarian to industrial pursuits.
My ancestors painted themselves blue with woad, practiced human sacrifice, and worshipped at big rocks.
I guess I had better get busy.
And that's precisely why I'm a member of Sons of Confederate Veterans.
One thing southerners would do well to learn is that the Confederacy and the South are two different things. The Confederacy was the product of a political class looking out for the welfare of the institution of slavery for the benefit of a rather narrow group of people.
If Southerners want to honor their ancestors, they will condemn the Confederacy that misused the honorable instincts of the southern people.
Dixie Ping
If England can celebrate its history, which at times has been the bloodiest in the World — beheadings, kidnappings ect — then I have the same right.
Uneducated? A great many are, and that’s simply because they are lazy.
But, we still have our manners.
Something the North was never very good at.
:)
Would Blacks be better off today if they had not been brought to North America?
Things that the South gave to America: American clothing, love of the outdoors, country music, rock music, blues music, soul music, bluegrass music, zydeco music, the majority of settlers of the Western states, the oil that drove America’s economy for much of the 20th century, Gone With The Wind, the vast majority of America’s military brass, Mardi Gras, soul food, gumbo, bourbon whiskey, The Hurricane, the majority of soldiers in the U.S. military today, the vast majority of American blacks, the above ground cemetary, RC Cola, Coca-Cola, and a whole lot more.
I am with you!
And slavery could have been outlawed at the onset of the US but nobody listened to John Adams and too many of the founders had slaves including that hypocrite Thomas Jefferson.
Slavery never helped anybody in the south but the planter class. Sure didn’t help the farmer or the good country people.
Thanks for the Ping.
Those who would destroy the symbols of our History are no different than the Taliban who love to destroy the symbols of Bhuddism remaining in Afghanistan.
You mean burning libraries is not the pinnacle of enlightenment?
Shakespeare??? Don't need that. Nobody talks like that anymore, anyhow. :)
It was also extremely cost ineffective. Why pay to house, feed and doctor slaves when you can just hire immigrant laborers, at slave wages, for a fraction of the cost.
I sent my daughter to UA to learn manners, she did. I am A Yankee Yankee.
Of for the love of God, everyone down here knows what the war was really about, state’s rights and tariffs. It all went back to the nullification crisis of 1832, and before you go and trash the Confederacy, remember, one of the most important developers of conservative thought was John C. Calhoun.
You want to talk about the history of the Southern people, fine, here is the straight history. Prior to the war, the South had almost no indigency whatsoever. The only indigents that there were usually consisted of immigrants in the port cities and those people who are always indigent, such as the mentally infirmed, the single mother (traditionally, etc)
The vast majority of the Southern population, on the average, had a better standard of living than the vast majority of the Northern population. The South was a place where someone could come with little to no money and within a couple of years, they’d be among the most propserous citizens if they worked hard. Not everyone was a planter or a merchant. Most Southerners in the rural areas were yeoman farmers who did very well for themselves, and almost all of them could afford the yearly trip to whatever cosmopolitan port they were closest too.
Southerners were much more tolerant of religious differences then their northern counterparts. In the north there was rampant anti-Semitism, rampant anti-Catholicism, and all sorts of other religious bigotries. In the South, we had a religiously mixed gentry. In the North, Jews were usually condemned to poverty in the ghettoes, in the South, they were often among the leading citizens. It was a beautiful society totally destroyed by the war and “reconstruction”
There was no pervasive poverty in this region before northern social engineers decided to loot it for their own gain, and every problem that we still face today can be traced back to the period between 1865-77.
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