November 3, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
What the Historic
South has to Teach America: Readings from Conservative Scholar Russell Kirk
But Can the South
Survive?
Friends,
Many
present-day Southerners—indeed, many of those Americans who call themselves
“conservatives”—find it difficult to envisage a time when Southern and
Confederate traditions (not to mention heroic and noble Confederate veterans
like “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee) were accounted and acknowledged
with honor and great respect. Today it would seem so-called “conservative
media” (in particular Fox and the radio talksters) and Republican politicians
would rather praise “Father” Abraham Lincoln or the radical black Abolitionist,
Frederick Douglass (whose liaison with German-born socialist and feminist
Ottilie Assing certainly influenced him and should raise eyebrows
among contemporary conservatives, but seldom does). These and other
revolutionary zealots have been incorporated into the pantheon of “great
conservative minds,” dislodging such figures as Jefferson Davis, John C.
Calhoun and John Randolph of Roanoke, all of whom possessed towering intellects
and an acute understanding of the history and nature of the American union
which Lincoln, Douglass, and those like them lacked.
It is far
too common in 2019 to witness the woeful historical ignorance of a Dinesh
D’Souza or the meandering narration of a Brian Kilmeade in the
godawful Fox News series, “Legends & Lies: The
Civil War,” in which he accuses the “South
of attempting to rewrite history by denying slavery was the root cause of the
Civil War,” and parrots the far Left template on racism.
And what of distinguished Southern writers who defend the
South like historians Drs. Clyde Wilson or Brian McClanahan? Or literary
luminaries such as James E. Kibler? Or Emory University scholar Don Livingston?
When was the last time you saw their byline in the current, Neoconservative-edited
National Review, once the
“conservative magazine of record” in the land? They are, to use a Stalinist
metaphor, “non-persons” among establishment conservatives and the contemporary
“conservative movement.” One must not, under any circumstance, mention their
names among Neocon intelligentsia circles, lest suspicions of “racism” or
“Neo-Confederate tendencies” be exposed.
Perhaps the worst event symbolizing this exile was the
unceremonious expulsion—the political defenestration—of perhaps the South’s
greatest essayist and author of the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, the
late Mel Bradford. Tapped originally to be President Ronald’s chairman
of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bradford was a staunch
defender of the original American Constitution, an acerbic and powerful critic
of Lincoln and his legacy—and a defender of the South. According
to chronicler David Gordon: "Bradford rejected Lincoln
because he saw him as a revolutionary, intent on replacing the American Republic established
by the Constitution with
a centralized and leveling despotism."
Although supported by such figures as Russell Kirk, Jeffrey
Hart, Peter Stanlis, and Jesse Helms, Bradford was forced to experience an ugly,
defamatory and underhanded campaign by the Neocons George Will, the Kristols pere et fils, and others to halt his nomination,
in favor of Democrat Neocon, William Bennett. And, tasting blood, the new
rulers of the conservative movement were successful.
Yet, it was not always so. A half-century ago Southern
writers of distinction, defenders of our traditions and heritage, including our
revered historical figures and champions of the Confederacy, were welcomed in
national conservative publications like National
Review. And in Russell Kirk’s scholarly quarterly Modern Age, that acknowledged “father of the conservative revival”
of the earlier 1950s, dedicated an entire issue (Fall
1958) to the South and a defense of its traditions, including its Confederate history.
In the prefatory essay, “Norms, Conventions and the
South,” to that issue Kirk authored, as
only he could, a stirring and profound defense of the traditional South, its
virtues, and its critical significance in the survival of the American
confederation. In it he declares: “Without the South to act as its Permanence, the American Republic
would be perilously out of joint. And the South need feel no shame for its
defense of beliefs that were not concocted yesterday.” But he also—sixty-one
years ago—had a warning and an admonition for Southerners:
How much
longer the South will fulfill this function, I do not venture to predict here.
I am aware of all those powerful influences, material and intellectual, which
are changing the South today. It may be that the South, in the end, will be
made homogeneous with all the rest of the nation, and that its peculiar role as
conservator of norm and convention will be terminated. But if this comes to
pass, the South will have ceased to exist: it will have lost its genius.
What would Kirk, “the Sage
of Mecosta,” that superb word-smith and Olympian man-of-letters say today he if
were to return to our Southland? What verdict would he venture to cast on those
guardians of our heritage and our inheritance…and the actions we and our
fathers have taken, or not taken, during the past six decades? How would
Kirk—who saw before he passed away in 1994 the dangerous infection of the
Neoconservatives—evaluate the willingness of far too many Southern
“conservatives” to forego serious investigation into and defense of their
history and accept the “mess of stale porridge” offered up by a Brian Kilmeade,
or a Dinesh D’Souza, or a Senator Lindsey Graham?
*****
I pass on to you a small
portion, the last few paragraphs of Kirk’s essay (the entire essay is readable,
but still under some copyright restrictions):
“…conventions are the means
by which obedience to norms is inculcated in a society.
“Conventions are compacts
by which we agree to respect one another’s dignity and rights. A high degree of
respect for convention is quite consonant with a high degree of personality,
even of eccentricity. Many of the great “characters,” indeed, are the great
champions of convention: the names of Samuel Johnson and Disraeli, John Adams
and Theodore Roosevelt may suffice to illustrate my meaning. There is no necessary
opposition between strong outward indifference to foible and strong inward
loyalty to norms. Nowhere has this union of ardent personality with attachment
to convention been stronger than in the American South. And to make myself
clear, I digress here briefly upon that arch-Southerner John Randolph of
Roanoke.
“No important political
leader ever was more eccentric than Randolph, whose genius was tinged with
madness. John Randolph is the most interesting man in American political
history, his wisdom and eloquence curiously intertwined with vituperation,
duels, brandy, agriculture, solitude, and tragedy. Through Calhoun, [Langdon]
Cheves, and many others,
Randolph’s opinions were stamped indelibly upon the South; and his life was the
romancer’s notion of a Southern aristocrat’s career. In almost all outward
things, Randolph declined to conform to
the great tendencies of his time, which he thought an age profoundly
decadent. But in all important inward things, John Randolph conformed to those
norms and defended those conventions which go back to Sinai and the banks of
the Ilyssus. A fervent Christian, a champion of tradition, the principal
American expounder of Burke’s conservative politics, Randolph of Roanoke abided
by enduring standards in defiance of power, popularity, and the intellectual
climate of opinion of his era.
“There are certain great
principles, Randolph said, which we ignore only at our extreme peril; and if
those principles are flouted long enough, private character and the social
order sink beyond restoration. In this, as in much else, Randolph was the
exemplar of the Southern society. For the South has long been the Permanence of
the American nation. Strongly attached to Christian belief, bound up with the
land and the agricultural interest, skeptical of the visions of Progress and
human perfectibility, imbued with the tragic sense of life, the South has not
been ashamed to defend convention and continuity in this great, swelling,
confusing Republic: to abide by ancient norms of private and public life. The
problem of the races informed Southerners that society’s tribulations are not
susceptible of simple abstract remedy; the rural life kept the South aware of
the vanity of human wishes, the existence of Providential purpose, and the
immortal contract of eternal
society; the political and literary traditions of the Southern states endured
little altered by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century passion for innovation.
Military valor, courtesy toward women, and the pieties of community, home, and
family persisted in the South despite defeat and poverty and the intellectual
ascendancy of the North. When Demos seemed to be king everywhere else in the
United States, the old allegiance to eternal verities lived on in the Southern
region.
“So it is that in our time
of troubles the South has something to teach the modern world. So it is, as
[Southern Regionalist author and poet] Mr. Donald Davidson says, that the
modern South has a great literature: for literature is created out of belief
and tradition-even when the writer dissents from belief and tradition, still he
must have norms from which to dissent, if his work is to endure-and in an era
of literary nihilism, Southern writers still recognize those enduring elements
of human nature, including the splendor and tragedy of human existence, that
are the stuff of which great poetry and prose are made. Belief in normality,
and defense of convention, have not lain like lead upon Southern thought and
life; on the contrary, these have been the foundations of Southern achievement.
“Once a progressive
gentleman in Nashville informed me that the Southern respect for tradition was
contemptible; in his city, he said, this so-called tradition went back only
three generations. Well, I replied, this is precisely one hundred years
superior to no tradition. But of
course Southern norms and conventions have their real roots in classical and
Christian antiquity. An interesting book, I believe, could be written about the
influence of Cicero upon Southerners: upon their oratory, their politics, their
whole view of the civil social order. And aside from Christian teaching, Cicero
has been the greatest preceptor of norms in the Western world-greater even than
Plato or Virgil in his influence. In its taste for imaginative literature,
similarly, the South has chosen for its favorite authors the champions of norm
and convention. Mark Twain believed that Southerners derived from Sir Walter
Scott an affection for sham,
pretense, and romantic nonsense. Scott was, indeed, a prime favorite in the
South; but I happen to believe that Southerners recognized in Walter Scott a
spirit of courage, of chivalry, of loyalty, an expression of ancient truths,
that was congenial to their instincts.
“Anyone who reads John
Randolph’s comments upon the Waverly
novels will perceive that this Southern affinity for the Wizard of the North
was more than snobbery and foolery.
“The South, then, has been
the Permanence of America: the
defender—sometimes consciously, sometimes blindly—of principles immensely
ancient, of conventions that yet have meaning. How much longer the South will
fulfill this function, I do not venture to predict here. I am aware of all
those powerful influences, material and intellectual, which are changing the
South today. It may be that the South, in the end, will be made homogeneous
with all the rest of the nation, and that its peculiar role as conservator of
norm and convention will be terminated. But if this comes to pass, the South
will have ceased to exist: it will have lost its genius.
“To the mind of the doctrinaire
liberal, the zealot for Progress and Uniformity, in the North and in Europe,
our Southern states seem the incarnation of all things reactionary,
obscurantist, and hateful. The Broadway plays reflect this detestation, and the
Communist caricatures of America. A well-known
European professor, when a member of the faculty of a well-known Middlewestern
university, set two fees for public lectures: three hundred dollars for a
lecture anywhere in the United States except the South, and six hundred dollars
for any lecture south of Mason’s and Dixon’s Line. He was a utopian liberal;
and though he never had been in the South, he was convinced he knew all its
sins. (No Southern university or college, however, happened to invite him to
speak.) This hostility usually fastens upon certain institutions or customs for
its excuse: the poll-tax, share-cropping, segregated schools, and all that. But
behind these asserted reasons for
denouncing the south lies a deeper prejudice. The twentieth-century
ideologue--who, as Hawthorne said of the Abolitionist, brandishes his one idea
like an iron flail--has his own form of bigotry.
“He detests and dreads the
South because he senses that the South still stands resolute in defense of
norms and conventions. To the ritualistic liberal, the South is what Santayana
called “the voice of a forlorn and dispossessed orthodoxy,’’ rudely breaking in
upon the equalitarian dreams and terrestrial-paradise schemes of the neoterist.
As Santayana added, this voice is the more disquieting because
nowadays it is scarcely understood. To the Gnostic visionary, to the secularist
worshipper of Progress and Uniformity, respect for norms and conventions is the
mark of the beast. The convictions and customs of the South perpetually
irritate the radical reformer, who is impatient to sweep away every obstacle to
the coming of his standardized, regulated, mechanized, unified world, purged of
faith, variety, and ancient longings. Permanence he cannot abide; and the South
is Permanence. He hungers after a state like a tapioca-pudding, composed of so
many identical globules of other-directed men. Now the troubles of our times
have worried this zealot for heaven upon earth; he has secret misgivings
nowadays; and the more he experiences inner doubts of the perfectibility of man
and society, the more does he flail against the champions of norm and
convention, endeavoring in the heat of his assault to forget the disquieting
voice of a forlorn and dispossessed orthodoxy that prophesies disaster for men
who would be as gods.
“My
argument is this. Without
an apprehension of norms, there is no living in society or out of it. Without
sound conventions, the civil social order dissolves. Without the South to act
as its Permanence, the American Republic would be perilously out of joint. And
the South need feel no shame for its defense of beliefs that were not concocted
yesterday.”
[Russell Kirk (editor),
“Norms, Conventions and the South,” MODERN
AGE, Fall 1958, pp. 343-344]
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