I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century

Introduction

xi introduction The Witness and Wisdom of John Andrew Rice Mark Bauerlein Those of us who believe that a clear understanding of the past is essential to an honest, rational present are particularly fond of small facts that explode stereotypes about American history that people maintain for reasons other than knowledge. When the subject is the American South, subject as it is to simplistic and sentimental beliefs, certain records have a corrective value, each of the following, for instance: • Today we think that the Civil War settled the nation’s greatest crisis, Grant and Sherman routing the opposition,but for decades afterwards, “wherever men gathered, the Confederate veteran was present to tell how the South had been—not defeated, never that—bilked, cheated, tricked out of victory, overwhelmed. . . . ‘If we’d just ’a had one more company, we’d ’a licked ’em.’” • The idea that states have a distinctive character is quaint in our hypermobile society, but throughout the nineteenth century, before the New South arrived, southern states had acknowledged social identities. For example, Virginia and South Carolina were considered the only states in which gentlemen resided. The other states remained “colonial”; North Carolina was a backwater of mountain folk, Georgia was a place to which one “under suspicion of crime” fled, Alabama had “not seen xii Introduction enough of aristocracy to see through it,”Florida did not count because it “can hardly be called a state,” and Louisiana remained a “half-caste” outlier. • We are a fairly hygienic people, with tobacco-free zones, but 120 years ago the South “was a spitting world.”All working class and many middle class men chewed tobacco, and “no public place was without its receptacle.” As for other options, “cigars were smoked mostly for convenience , when spitting must be restrained, or for relaxation; cigarettes were left to dudes.”Women had their own habits,such as the “snuff box and dipping stick.” • Black and white boys knew their places but cooperated when they could, for instance, when whites had to don stiff new shoes after a barefoot summer: “My cousins allowed Negro boys to break theirs in and limp for a week afterward in return for one Sunday of glory.” • And this from a women’s college, revealing an unexpected idol of the young: “One day I noticed a girl standing by a magnolia tree and looking with sad eyes at an inscription she had just cut in the bark . . . then I looked and saw that she had carved, ‘Ruskin is dead.’” These examples come from John Andrew Rice’s edifying memoir, here re­ published in its complete form for the first time after its suppression in the 1940s. (See William Craig Rice’s afterword for how the book’s life was cut short.) The story contains enough of these instructive realities alone to justify its appearance in 2014, with the circumstances of Rice’s early and middle life (roughly,1895 to 1935) presented in one startling and illuminating vignette after another. Some of the scenes evoke shock, such as one which unfolds outside a religious camp meeting with its fringe accompaniment of “furtive dispensers of corn liquor”: “I remember a farmer boy who lay on the ground in a drunken stupor while his father lashed him with an ox whip five feet long. The old man whirled the whip around his head and snarled with every stroke,‘I’ll teach you not to be a sinner.’”Or, for example, this mode of maintaining order in the 1890s schoolhouse: the teacher assigned exercises Introduction xiii to be completed in silence, then piled peach tree switches in the corner, and “by midmorning the whipping began,in the palm for the smallest,across the back for the rest, boys and girls alike.” Other scenes fill us with disgust, such as the white businessmen in Montgomery who sold goods to illiterate black residents on the payment plan, the payments never ending and the sewing machines and dishes never delivered; or the New Orleans doctor who tells Rice that if all blacks were moved to the cities, tuberculosis and syphilis would eradicate them, adding, “that’s what we ought to do.” Still others astonish merely by their cosmic difference from our own time, for instance, the acute class consciousness in spite of degraded conditions . As Rice put it,“in the South Carolina of my childhood there were few or no rich, only the well-born—and...