Essay: The End of the South

(2 of 2)

The oft-cited fact that white Southerners have voted overwhelmingly for the national Republican ticket in recent years means less, and more, than is usually attributed to it. So have white Northerners. The instincts that prompt Southerners to support Republican presidential candidates are instincts that bind them in national, rather than regional, solidarity.

After the Vietnam defeat, Southerners are no longer the only Americans who understand, in Arnold Toynbee's phrase, that history is not something that happens only to other people. Wrestling unsuccessfully with guilt and defeat is no longer a Southern monopoly.

Southern cities are growing faster than others, and Southerners move more often than people raised elsewhere. The two fastest-growing groups in the South today are Hispanics and white Yankees. As first noted in the 1980 census, more blacks are moving south than are moving north. In the 1988 presidential election, nearly 50% of those who voted in the South were born elsewhere. The South is still poor, too poor. But while some of the shine has gone out of the Sunbelt, in 1988 the Rocky Mountain States replaced the South as the region with the lowest per capita income.

These are facts whose cumulative, corrosive effect on Southern distinctiveness is obvious. But there is also the mass culture's relentless assault on the sense of context, continuity and community in the South no less than elsewhere. White Southerners of my generation were raised on the glories of the Lost Cause. Our grandchildren are raised on Saturday-morning cartoons and MTV.

But there is more separating 1990s youngsters from the sense of place and history that so clearly marked their parents' childhoods. Most older white Southerners overtly or passively supported massive resistance in the '50s and '60s. What can they possibly say to their children to justify or explain, let alone glorify, the wretched record of racial murders, political demagogues, separate rest rooms and school closings? If the South once venerated a past that would not die, it now has a more recent past that must be denied -- or ignored.

Not long ago, I asked an old friend who teaches at a university in Mississippi whether he thought today's young white Southerners had the same sense of the South that we had. There was a pause, and then he offered a story he thought might help frame the answer. During a recent history class, another teacher was suddenly interrupted by a student, a white Southerner, who looked up with a puzzled frown and asked, "Tell me again, which side was Sherman on?"