James C. Cobb

The Necessary South

ince the earliest days of the republic the South has served primarily as what Jack P. Greene called “a negative example of what America had to overcome before it could finally realize its true self.” The struggle to transcend this burdensome regional anomaly would play out over the better part of two centuries, but by the time it appeared finally to have run its course, some were beginning to complain that, in the end, it was the South that had actually overcome, and, in the process, prevented the nation from becoming all that it could be. Even before 30 million Americans outside the South chose a bona fide representative of a racially transformed and economically vibrant Dixie to lead the country out of its post-Watergate funk in 1976, liberals were bemoaning the ominous “rise of the Southern Rim” and the insidiously conservatizing effects of the “Southernization of America.” That such rhetoric is still in vogue more than a generation later suggests that not all of the resistance to integrating the South into national life has originated in the South itself. For all the evidence that a once-recalcitrant Dixie is, for better or worse, now one with the rest of the country, many outside the region and even a few within it still cling to a static vision of a defiantly unchanged, indisputably inferior South, which, in turn, provides the negative counterpoint necessary to sustain their equally rigid and decidedly idealized vision of America’s “true self.”1 Pointing to critical changes in the South, a veritable slew of pundits had suggested that the perceived differences between region and nation were disappearing long before John Egerton referred in 1973 to the “Americanization of Dixie.” On the other hand, Egerton was one of the first to argue that the South’s loss of distinctiveness had actually been accelerated by the concomitant “Southernization of America,” observing that “the North, for its part, seems more overtly racist than it had been; shorn of its pretensions of moral innocence, it is exhibiting many of the attitudes that once were thought to be the exclusive possession of white Southerners.”2 Egerton used “Southernization” merely as a figurative description of what he saw happening in the 1970s, but a host of liberal commentators quickly seized on the term as a literal explanation, in which a sudden, aggressive, nationwide contagion of southern white values became primarily responsible for America’s pronounced tilt to the right during the last quarter of the 20th century. “Southernization,” wrote George Packer, “was an attitude that spread north—suspicion of government, antielitism, racial resentment, a highly personal religiosity.”3 Catering to white Southerners’ resentment of Democratic support for civil rights advances, Barry Goldwater had carried five southern states in 1964,

Damn Brother, I Don't Believe I'd A-Told That!: Humor and the Cultural Identity of the American South

I first set foot in this hallowed structure in September 1965 to attend a freshman orientation session presided over by none other than the University of Georgias legendary dean of men, William Tate, who was both a great wit and an old-school practitioner of what is now known as “tough love.” As Dean Tate set me and several hundred of my classmates straight on the great many things that might incur his wrath, he softened his stern admonitions with a number of interspersed and disarming one-liners. The one I recall most vividly after all these years is his observation that the baby boomer-induced, on-campus housing crunch would be mitigated at least a bit that year by the admission of a particularly large contingent of southern Baptists, who were typically so narrow that three of them could share a single bed. The ensuing sprinkle of no more than polite laughter suggested that his quip had gone right over most of the student heads in the Chapel that day. Still, as I look back on it now, I am struck by the quintessential “southernness” of Dean Tate’s use of what he honestly believed was “insider” humor to signal to an auditorium filled with anxious eighteen-year-old boys that while he expected to be seen as an authority figure, he hoped at least to be understood as an empathetic one.