Flashes of a Southern Spirit: Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South

Four. Our Land, Our Country: Faulkner, the South, and the American Way of Life

4 Our Land, Our Country Faulkner, the South, and the American Way of Life In his essay “On Privacy (The American Dream: What Happened to It?)” William Faulkner complained of the invasion of his privacy by a writer who penned a story on him despite his wishes. He blamed corporate America: the magazine company, not the writer, was really at fault. This experience led Faulkner to speculate on the decline of individual liberty in a world increasingly dominated by “powerful federations and organizations and amalgamations like publishing corporations and religious sects and political parties and legislative committees ” that use “such catch-phrases as ‘Freedom’ and ‘Salvation’ and ‘Security’ and ‘Democracy’” to delude the public. The ultimate danger , for Faulkner, was mass conformity and the intimidation that went with it. He feared that someday anyone who was individual enough to want privacy “even to change his shirt or bathe in, will be cursed by one universal American voice as subversive to the American way of life and the American flag.” He had a wonderful description of the voice of public conformity — “that furious blast, that force, that power rearing like a thunder-clap into the American zenith, multiple-faced yet mutually conjunctived, bellowing the words and phrases which we have long since emasculated of any significance or meaning other than as tools, 78 Chapter Four implements, for the further harassment of the private individual human spirit, by their furious and immunised high priests: ‘Security.’ ‘Subversion .’ ‘Anti-Communism.’ ‘Christianity.’ ‘Prosperity.’ ‘The American Way of Life.’ ‘The Flag.’”1 Faulkner’s 1955 essay is a telling commentary on American culture of the 1950s — a time of the organizational society, the man in the gray flannel suit, McCarthyism, and pietistic patriotism. His overt use of the term “American Way of Life” is also most appropriate, as Americans used the term often in the decade to reify an ideology of the United States that would define what this country represented in the cultural front of the cold war with the Soviet Union. If the Soviets had communism, we had the American Way. Faulkner wrote as a southerner, but one at a particular moment in time. Like most southern intellectuals of his era, he is far removed from the concerns of “southern tradition” as outlined in chapter 1. By the 1950s, Faulkner had won the Nobel Prize for Literature and become an international figure. Yet he was keenly aware of the South’s heritage and the fact that he was living through a time of enormous social change. He could see a turbulent future for the region’s system of racial segregation.2 The term “American Way of Life” is a useful one in providing a structured way to investigate an aspect of Faulkner’s understanding of the South and the nation. Public interest in an “American Way” rose simultaneously with the beginning of Faulkner’s most creative years in the 1930s and lasted into the 1950s, when he was reflecting most explicitly in public statements about contemporary issues in American culture . I want to place Faulkner’s attitude toward America in the context of the history of the term “American Way of Life” and a variant of it, the “Southern Way of Life.” Faulkner, of course, inherited this latter term as well, and understanding its meanings can also help us appreciate Faulkner’s efforts to relate his “little postage stamp of native soil” to broader regional and national issues. I want to position him, then, in terms of these concepts and also in relation to the term the “American Dream,” which he used in two key essays in the 1950s. This chapter is a study of Faulkner the intellectual and his views at a particular moment in time; his use of the ideological term “way of life” evokes national and regional traditions in particular and revealing terms. Our Land, Our Country 79 Mitford M. Mathews, in the Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles (1951), identified the earliest use of the term “American Way” in 1885, when a magazine writer observed: “To use an expression made popular, we believe, by General Hawley some years ago in regard to a very different question, dynamiting is ‘not the American way!’” It is good to know that blowing up things was not seen as peculiarly American in 1885, but Mathews’s other references suggest that the term did not come into popular use...