The South at Work: Observations from 1904

Evidences of Important Changes in Its Ideals

Evidences of Important Changes in Its Ideals Eager Commercialism—Supplanting the Old Pride and Scorn for Wealth—The South Becoming Aware of Its Vast Resources—A Significant Contrast of Alabama and Indiana—The Labor Problem Still the Most Important One, but Immigration Promises to Be a Partial Solvent [Special Correspondence of the Transcript] • Washington, Feb. 25 Hundreds of wealthy Northern people have gone South this winter in search of warmth and amusement—more probably, than ever before. But they have seen very little of Southern life. Renewing at Palm Beach, Ormond and Asheville the old parade of Bar Harbor, Newport and New York, they have given to “the natives” about as much study as they did in Maine last summer. They have been served in many cases by the same hotel people who catered for them on the New England coast or in the Adirondacks or the White Mountains.1 Other Northern people a trifle less wealthy, have taken more modest refuge this extraordinary winter in places where more of what was distinctly Southern in their environment may have seeped in.But the Northern tourists whose report of what is doing “down South” would be best worth while are of a different and far more numerous class.They went South for business not Published in the Boston Evening Transcript, February 27, 1904, pg. 20. Evidences of Important Changes in Its Ideals 9 for pleasure. If they had consulted chiefly their own comfort they would have stayed at home.The trains on which they travelled were nearly always late.The hotels at which they stayed were as a rule inferior to those of New England mill towns. Returning, they will have nothing to tell of golf and tennis and surf baths; very little, in fact of any sort of baths. But these undistinguished tourists, these commercial travelers, these drummers, if you will, could tell us more of the South, than the more important people in Palm Beach, whose wares they may have been selling.2 I am not sure their talk would not be more instructive even than that of the admirable company which every spring Mr. Robert C. Ogden of New York conveys to the annual meeting of the Southern Educational Association .3 These highly intelligent visitors meet there a body of Southerners whose point of view is scarcely distinguishable from their own, and exchange with them oratory of a grade uncommonly high. The drummers meet all sorts of Southerners and exchange with them talk that is not so elaborately garnished. Their reports to their houses would be, next to the systematized information gathered by Southern railroads, the best material for a study of Southern conditions and tendencies today.4 An Apt Story Last June at a Southern State university, the principal address was given by a politician who comes nearer real leadership than most of his fellows in that section. Half of it was oratory of a sort that is going out of fashion even there—a wearisome threshing over of old controversies, political and sectional . The other half was by contrast strikingly modern. It closed with the following story: Soon after the Franco-Prussian War a Frenchman and a German, seated at the same table in a public café,fell into violent controversy over French and German civilization.The Frenchman’s main contention was that France alone keeps art alive in the world. She alone, he said, still loves and still creates the beautiful. The German plucked a hair from his bristly moustache, laid it on the table and contemptuously bade the Frenchman go and make something beautiful of that. Some weeks later he received the answer to his challenge from a Parisian jeweler. In an elaborate scarf-pin an eagle’s claw grasped the hair by the middle. Pendent from either end was a pearl. On one was written the word “Alsace,” on the other “Lorraine,” and underneath was the legend “Held—by a hair.”5 The orator with perfect seriousness, applied the sentiment to present-day relations between the North and South.Their old rivalry, he declared is come 10 Evidences of Important Changes in Its Ideals into a new phase. It is no longer mainly political. It will never again pass into a military conflict. It is economic, industrial—a rivalry in money-making. And he concluded, with confident eloquence, that the North’s ascendancy in wealth, in education, in prosperity of all...