One Homogeneous People: Narratives of White Southern Identity, 1890–1920

Introduction

Introduction “The State is only a home on a larger scale.” Southerners have a reputation as storytellers, as a people fond of telling about family, community , and the southern way of life. This is a book about some of those stories and their consequences . One Homogeneous People: Narratives of White Southern Identity, 1890–1920 examines the forging and the embracing of southern panwhiteness as an ideal during the volatile years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. Despite real and significant divisions within the South along lines of religion, class, and ethnicity , white southerners, especially in moments of perceived danger, asserted that they were one peopleboundbyasharedhistory,aloveoffamily, home, and community, and an uncompromising belief in white supremacy. They explained their region and its people to themselves and other Americans through narratives of white southern identity found in a variety of forms and contexts: political oratory, fiction, historiography, literary criticism, and the built environment.1 Dominant voices asserted that the South was essentially a well-ordered household whose integrity proceeded from natural, racialized imperatives. In “The Creed of the Old South” (1892), for instance, BasilL.Gildersleeve,aJohnsHopkinsUniversity classicist and Confederate veteran, explained xvi Introduction that while the “Virginia farmer” and the “Creole planter of Louisiana were of different strains,” the “community of views, of interest, of social order” in the South constituted a “true nationality.” In Gildersleeve’s estimation, the South was constituted not ideologically but organically, by “an extraordinary ramification of family and social ties. . . . a few minutes’ conversation sufficed to place any member of the social organism from Virginia to Texas.”2 Such arguments that defined the South as a community of views and interests and as a social organism brushed away class, ethnic, and subregional distinctions within the South, and suggested that America’s South was one homogeneous people. This community, this family, argued turn-of-the-century white southerners , needed vigilant policing against a threatening outer chaos. White writers and orators usually explicitly, but always implicitly, represented the southern people and the community they constituted as white, and the threatening chaos as black.3 Writing of the overthrow of Reconstruction, Hilary A. Herbert explained: “To avert ruin white men united. . . . The race against which the negro had allowed himself to be arrayed has never yet met its master.”4 White southerners after Reconstruction went looking for and invented a common past and a vision of contemporary common identity. In the name of defending home and community and those asserted common interests , white southerners Jim Crowed, lynched, and subjugated the region’s African Americans. The safety of home and family, and the maintenance of the southern way of life, they often said, demanded no less. White southerners’ explanations of themselves and their society as a family and a community proceeded from two fundamental assumptions: that racial difference existed and mattered, and that it was imperative to uphold this distinction to preserve order from disorder. Narratives of white southern identity both grew out of and affirmed most white southerners’ commitments to white supremacy and black oppression. Their stories were built of potent and intertwined narratives that treated race and gender as fixed and determining lodestones of identity, and that simply refused to see social class as evidence of any fundamental inequities in southern society or as a potential solvent of white common interest. Broadly shared late-Victorian notions of domesticity made white southerners’ cautionary tales about racial danger persuasive and effective.5 Introduction xvii The metaphor of community or state as a well-ordered household was not invented in the nineteenth-century South, of course. The assertion was a staple of Western political discourse from classical antiquity through the Renaissance and beyond. Nineteenth-century Americans placed particular emphasis on the morally regenerative powers of home and family, often saying that the order and virtue engendered at home were essential in nurturing the larger culture’s vitality. The opposite was true, too, they believed. After the Civil War, white southerners were particularly concerned about the fruits of disordered households, specifically the connection between disordered public and disordered private life.6 Characterizing the white South as a family seemed natural, as well, in the context of contemporary progressive reform rhetoric. Reform movements, both southern and national, were suffused with the rhetoric of middle-class domesticity, with reformers such as Frances Willard of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union seeking “to make the whole world homelike.”7 And male southern progressives, like their northern counterparts, found the paternalistic, corrective rhetoric of the...