The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960–1980 by Zachary J. Lechner (review)

As white Americans grappled with the social and political revolutions of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the growth of postwar consumerism, a new generation of writers, filmmakers, musicians, and their audiences looked to the U.S. South in search of refuge. From Alabama author Harper Lee to The Band, a musical group made up of four Canadians and an Arkansan, white artists and audiences from the southern states and beyond found inspiration in the people and cultures of the region, particularly the stories of white southerners. Zachary J. Lechner's The South of the Mind uses a rich source base of memoirs, journalism, film, music, and fiction to explore how and why these different iterations of idealized white Souths fascinated cultural producers and consumers in the 1960s and 1970s. For Lechner, depictions of the white South during this pivotal moment in U.S. history hold the key to understanding "how such fantasies proved culturally and politically expedient for southerners and nonsoutherners alike" (p. 16).

Lechner guides the reader through his survey of pop culture by creating a taxonomy of three different white Souths portrayed in the press and in artistic works during the civil rights movement: the Vicious South, the Changing South, and the Down-Home South. He finds the Vicious South emerging in the everyday racist attitudes of white southerners encountered by literary travelers like John Steinbeck, as well as in infamous examples of white supremacist violence like the attacks on civil rights protestors in Selma led by Alabama State Troopers. Lechner locates the Changing South in Harper Lee's Atticus Finch and Chief Bill Gillespie from In the Heat of the Night. Such characters showed audiences that certain white southerners allegedly possessed an innate, sometimes dormant, morality that might overcome racism, at least on a personal level. And while these characters grappled with the South's racial politics, the representatives of the Down-Home South (think Andy Griffith and Jed Clampett) projected a wholesome, conveniently apolitical, and almost exclusively white version of southern life that evaded the question of race altogether. These southern characters spoke for a region that was out of step with the trappings of modern life and somehow more authentic than the rest of the world because of it.

That same need for authenticity drove elements of the counterculture towards mythologies of the white South. Lechner argues that the popularity of country rock acts like the Byrds and The Band reveals how hippies envisioned ditching contemporary society for an imaginary rural South that was impossibly untouched by mid-century commercialism. Similarly, what Lechner calls the Masculine South (a fourth category), as seen in the films like Walking Tall and heard in the political rhetoric of George Wallace, created a conservative antidote to the supposed emasculation endured by men in an age of mass conformity. By the mid-1970s, the nation looked to Jimmy Carter, who combined aspects of several southern imaginings, in the hopes that he might heal the nation's post-Vietnam, post-Watergate disillusionment.

The imagined Souths that Lechner identifies functioned as both an anchor in a sea of unrest and a cudgel in a battle over who and what defined the real America. For the counterculture, the South offered an escape from modern life, while other versions fueled the political fantasies of conservatives. Lechner's point is that each of these Souths could feel true to audiences depending on the moment. In this sense, The South of the Mind provides a concise and illuminating cultural history of the region as a mythmaking mirror, reflecting back what audiences believed themselves to be and what they wanted to become.