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{ 1 } A constant assault from without, an indictment of every aspect of their civilization , was the burden under which Southerners lived for more than a century (as if defeat and poverty and failure were not enough), and it is little wonder that such a legacy created men and women who sought to justify their past and their tradition. —Fred Hobson, Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain Despite the crucial roles of prominent southerners in securing America’s independence and drafting its fundamental documents of state, with the infant nation’s literary and publishing core already fixed firmly in the Northeast, it was hardly surprising that, even in its embryonic phase, the dominant vision of American character emphasized northern sensibilities and perceptions. One of these perceptions, and a difficult one to dismiss, was that the major impediment to constructing an inspiring and credible identity for a nation supposedly committed to the principles of liberty, equality, and democracy was a southern economy, society, and culture shaped and sustained by human bondage. As the leaders of the young republic struggled to gain the acceptance and respect of other nations, northern architects of national identity soon realized that their vision of America would not only be much simpler to construct but also much easier to look at and far more emphatic and unequivocal in meaning if they simply focused on what they saw, or sometimes chose to see, in the states above the recently drawn Mason-Dixon line. —James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity Why do they live there. Why do they live at all. —Shreve McCanon to Quentin Compson in William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! In February 1950, Eleanor Roosevelt visited the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and made several speeches on campus. When she returned to New York, her trip served as the subject of her syndicated column, “My Day,” which she tirelessly produced six days a week from 1935 to 1962, pausing only to mourn the death of her husband. In the piece devoted to her Carolina sojourn, Roosevelt discussed her southern roots. Her grandmother had been a member of the Bulloch family from Georgia, and although she described her southern introduction the anatomy of inferiority 2 } Introduction relatives with great affection, she also condemned the region for its poverty and provinciality. “One can enjoy oneself superficially,” she proclaimed, “but one must shut one’s eyes.”1 The criticism stung and unleashed a defensive counterattack from W. E. B. Debnam, a radio broadcaster in Raleigh, North Carolina, which would spread across the South. Sponsored by Smith-Douglas Fertilizer, Debnam read the farm news at noon each day.2 However, on February 8 and 9, 1950, an alarmed Debnam, in a single outburst, invoked two fundamental arguments of white superiority and northern hypocrisy that appeared whenever southerners felt compelled to defend themselves, as Debnam now did. Blaming the North for the problems of the South was a popular and deeply familiar strategy at the time, and in Debnam’s hands the technique assumed a barbed and personal tone as he replied to Mrs. Roosevelt by name: “There was no Marshall plan for the South 85 years ago, Mrs. Roosevelt. Instead of bearing gifts, our conquerors came in hordes demanding tribute.”3 Debnam did not deny the hardships and shortages in North Carolina, and throughout the South for that matter, but he insisted that destitution be recognized as a national problem and not simply a regional one: “There are signs of poverty and unhappiness just about everywhere. Mrs. Roosevelt doesn’t have to come South to find these things. Almost from the window of her hotel apartment in New York she can look out and see what is possibly the greatest cesspool of heaped-up-and-pressed-down-and-running-over poverty and crime and spiritual and moral and economic unhappiness on the face of the earth.”4 Debnam was pointedly referring to the African American community in Harlem, deploying a dramatic piece of rhetoric that would have found a receptive audience among many white southerners who had tuned in to hear the latest corn prices. In choosing Harlem as the subject for his aggressive counterattack , Debnam was preaching to the choir, of course, and his audience responded approvingly, convincing Debnam to publish in paperback his two-day rant. The sixty-page book, which he titled Weep No More, My Lady: A Southerner Answers Mrs. Roosevelt’s Report on the “Poor and Unhappy South...

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