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EPILOGUE: The Enduring Paradox of the South
- University of Georgia Press
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216 I epilogue The Enduring Paradox of the South So often in the South the stage seems all set for remarkable progress in public opinion and then something happens that swings us back into the old orbit of political and social immobility and decadence. . . . The liberals of the South are quite as well aware of these paradoxes as anyone else, but we insist that peoples of other sections should lay emphasis on the signs of progress rather than on those of reaction. —edwin mims The hordes of Yankeedom plainly regard themselves, not only as thoroughly competent critics, but in some measure as missionaries told off to preach the gospel violently in a heathen land. This is remarkable. When the messianic delusion infects an entire population, causing it to spend fifty years, and incalculable tons of paper and ink, not to mention spoken words, in discussion of a section that but rarely pays attention to its critics, the thing is surely traceable to some definite cause. —gerald w. johnson n 1926, Edwin Mims, chair of the literature department at Vanderbilt University, wrote in The Advancing South that “the conflict between the forces of progress and reaction has been going on ever since Appomattox.” Writing on the heels of the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, which pitted the fundamentalist southern guard against the modernist forces who embraced the theory of evolution, Mims described how a wave of people and organizations were “carrying on a veritable war of liberation in the Southern States.” He considered himself, along with individuals such as Walter Hines Page and Edgar Gardner Murphy, a model for a new generation of The Enduring Paradox of the South • 217 southern liberals fighting a reinvigorated and reactionary strain of conservatism . On the surface, Mims’s book appeared to underscore the persistent paradox of the South—the simultaneous pairing of provincialism with advancement —but he suggested optimistically that the “more outspoken, more belligerent, more apparently victorious” forces of traditionalism were in truth dying out. Indeed, Mims viewed the Scopes trial as a cultural aberration on an ever-changing southern landscape. In his book the Vanderbilt professor pledged not to discuss “abstract” southern problems and instead proffered a more cheerful interpretation of southern progress in industry, agriculture, literary thought, and even race relations.1 After reading Mims’s work, author Ellen Glasgow advocated placing it in all southern schools as evidence of “balance and sanity” and a civilized southern intellect. “Yet even as I read,” she confessed, “I wonder if the whole country, not the South alone is becoming intoxicated upon the same ancient deadly brew of fanaticism, intolerance, and hypocrisy?” Perhaps in subtle defense of the South or with a hint of skepticism about Mims’s sanguinity, she asked, “Is this the witches’ cauldron beginning to boil over again in the Land of the Free?”2 In short, was the nation becoming more like the Problem South or had the problems been national all along? Mims’s assessment of the South paralleled two other strains of thought in the 1920s and 1930s embodied in the work of H. L. Mencken and Howard W. Odum. Following World War I, interest in the “southern problem” did not wane although it evolved in several directions. Mencken and his compatriots relished the savagery and absurdity of southern backwardness and made poking fun of the South a national pastime. Some of his fellow social critics included Gerald W. Johnson of North Carolina, Grover C. Hall of the Montgomery Advertiser, Nell Battle Lewis of the Raleigh-News and Observer, and Julian Harris (the son of Joel Chandler Harris) and Julia Collier Harris of the Columbus Enquirer-Sun. The explosive growth of the Ku Klux Klan, the resurgence of religious evangelicalism, the Scopes trial, persistent racial violence, and even more flagrant examples of peonage provided fertile subject matter for musings on the South and in part contributed to a burgeoning southern literary renaissance in this period.3 Mencken established his own journal, the American Mercury, soliciting contributions on national and regional topics and often serving as a mentor to aspiring writers. The viciousness with which Mencken attacked the South eclipsed anything that had [54.146.154.243] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:34 GMT) 218 • epilogue come before it. Charles Angoff, managing editor to the Mercury, recalled that Mencken once called the region the “bunghole of the United States, a cesspool of Baptists, a miasma of Methodism, snake-charmers, phony real-estate operators, and syphilitic evangelists.”4 Mencken...