The South in Modern America A Region at Odds (review)

Walker Percy, or a young southerner, subject to a sociology experiment, who is bumped in an Ann Arbor hallway, called "asshole," then practically run down in a long corridor by a six-foot-three, 2 5o-pound football player. One's testosterone level spikes at the mere retelling of the clever, even diabolical experiments devised by Nisbett and Cohen. So too did the Cortisol levels (signifying stress, anxiety, and arousal) and testosterone levels (signifying aggression and dominance) of the southerners, but not the northerners, used in die Michigan experiments. Is this because the young southerners' culture long ago survived as a herding economy? It makes more sense to suggest that these real hormonal changes in southerners occur because their ability to neutralize blind aggressive impulses are simply inadequate and that, in ways one cannot discuss in a short review, this weakness derives from deficits or wounds in the core part of the psyche. If we fault the two authors of this study, it must not be because their science lacks the hardness of nails—or Detroit sheetmetal—but because they have not dared speculate as boldly as our novelists. Perhaps a litde more vicarious introspection (or empathy), even a bit less complacency with the externals gathered from stats and lab observations, would have enabled Nisbett and Cohen to comprehend the true nature of southern violence from within: that is, from that concealed weak center where—as the facade of honor once imperiled begins to crumble—rage begins. The South in Modern America A Region at Odds By Dewey W. Grantham HarperCollins, 1994 359 pp. Paper, $16.00 Reviewed by William A. Link, professor ofhistory at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of The Paradox ofSouthern Progressivism, 1SS0—1930 and William Friday: Power, Purpose, and American Higher Education. For the past half century or so, scholars and social critics have sought to understand the often ambiguous relationship between sectionalism and nationalism. Examining a unique cluster of political, economic, cultural, and geographic factors , students ofthe South in particular have asked how much and to what extent Reviews 83 uniquely regional characteristics have survived into our time. The most recent addition to this literature comes from Dewey W Grantham in HarperCollins's New American Nation Series, still the leading venue for narrative synthesis by American historians. Recounting the interplay between the South and the rest ofthe nation , Grantham shows that powerful feelings of mutual antagonism between North and South continued during the century after 1877. The Civil War cemented the "social solidarity" of southern white males. Historian and social critic Philip Alexander Bruce described this solidarity as "the sentiment that the Southerner is a separate and distinct sort of man, especially different from the Northerner, and that the distinction is one of which he should be proud." This heightened regional self-consciousness arose from peculiar social and economic conditions: the plantation economy, rural isolation, poverty, an oppressive racial caste system, and a political system that stifled dissent. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, new forces both reshaped and reaffirmed the South's position witiiin the nation. Populism disrupted class and racial unity; a new system ofwhite supremacy and one-party Democratic political rule coalesced in its aftermath. Severe depression during the 1 890s gave way to unprecedented prosperity, and the Spanish-American War in 1898 fostered a resurgent nationalism and sectional reconciliation. Full citizenship in the American nation—at least for the white South—accompanied this much-celebrated intersectional reconciliation. The North acknowledged southern white control over race relations; the Supreme Court's disinclination to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment formalized the nation's abandonment of African American civil rights. The heightened economic importance of the South was matched by the prominence ofregional- and national-level social and political reforms during the Progressive Era. During the 1920s, two faces to the modern South—and its relationship with the rest of the country—became apparent. One, an extension of the Progressive Era's tendencies toward reform, modernization, and economic development, looked toward greater nationalization. The parochial, traditionalist, and sectional side to the modern South was manifested in a strong drive toward cultural conformity exhibited in Protestant fundamentalism, prohibition...