Nation within a Nation: The American South and the Federal Government

7. The Evil Empire Within: Southern Nationalism and the Washington Problem

7 The Evil Empire Within Southern Nationalism and the Washington Problem David R. Jansson The South has truly had a conflicted relationship with the national government in Washington for most of its history, and this applies not only to white southerners but also to black southerners and the region’s Native Americans. The latter experienced time and again betrayal and oppression, as one treaty after another with the federal government was unilaterally broken by Washington. From the perspective of African Americans in the South, it is worth remembering that the U.S. Constitution defined the enslaved as less than fully human. After the abolition of slavery, the story of Reconstruction in the eyes of black southerners is ultimately one of abandonment , the betrayal of lofty promises. In the twentieth century, having mobilized to fight for their basic civil rights in the region, black southerners often turned to Washington for assistance in solidifying their achievements and breaking new ground. Not infrequently, they faced considerable ambivalence from federal authorities, in contrast to the typically heroic role federal officials (such as the FBI) play in Hollywood renderings of southern history.1 For southern whites, “the North” represented an important market for the products of the region’s fields and factories, but it also signified a power center in Washington, D.C., that was often outside the control of the region’s politicians. The tensions between the North and the white South may have culminated in the violent orgy of the Civil War, but they have continued ever since, through Reconstruction, through the major upheavals of the twentieth century, and into the era of a culturalized politics in the 1990s and early twenty-first century. The white South in particular continues to have an ambivalent relationship with Washington; many parts of the South depend heavily on federal 206 · David R. Jansson spending for their economic vitality, while Washington seems to increasingly represent the epicenter of overbearing, centralized, unaccountable, and undemocratic power. At issue in this chapter is the contribution of these tensions to the (re)production of a vision of (white) southern identity, and in particular the southern identity subscribed to by southern nationalists. I mean the term as analytic rather than judgmental, and I define “southern nationalists” as those individuals and groups who believe that the entity of the “southern people” make up a separate nation, distinct from the rest of the “American” nation. Quoting historian Clyde Wilson, the Southern National Congress argues that “we Southerners are a separate and distinct people, rooted in kinship and place, with a common culture and history. In other words, we are a nation. We respect the rights of other national and ethnic communities to self-preservation and self-determination, and we demand the same.”2 This interest in the self-determination of the “southern nation” is a defining attribute of southern nationalism. Southern identity and southern nationalism have been created not within the South but through the interactions between the South and the North (understanding “the North” here as the rest of the country outside the South). Human geographers are keen to emphasize that place identity is produced through interactions between places and at different scales;3 without these interactions, there is simply no need for a place identity. In the context of regionalism in the United States, historians have noted that the “sectional conflict” forged a coherent regional identity for southern whites and provided the foundation for southern nationalism. (It did the same for northern nationalism, even if this side of the equation is rather neglected compared to its southern counterpart.) In the words of historian John Hope Franklin: During these years [the 1840s] the pressures of sectional conflict were causing Southerners to minimize the physiographic variations within their section, the differences in the economic and social status of the people, and the several disagreements in political allegiances and philosophies . Committed to perpetuating a system of servitude increasingly condemned by the rest of the western world, southern whites began to think of themselves as having a set of common values, common problems, common dangers, and common aspirations that set them apart from other Americans. Inevitably they came to believe also that they had a common and distinctive history.4 The Evil Empire Within: Southern Nationalism and the Washington Problem · 207 As we know, these “pressures of sectional conflict” would not subside even after the Civil War but would be destined to live on...