One of the main themes that we have been exploring in the early part of this semester is the tension between the past and future in the southern mindset. We are going to dig a little deeper into this theme today.
Our podcast lecture outlines efforts made by private enterprise as well as local and state governments to industrialize the South. Be ready to discuss the ingredients of southern industrialization and to what extent it succeeded or failed.
These changes, however, did not go unnoticed, and not everyone appreciated what the push to industrialize had done to what they saw as the South's imperiled culture. Our reading today from Cobb's Away Down South discusses the reaction of southern writers and intellectuals to the "New South Creed."
As we discussed in class last Thursday, you might consider formulating your discussion questions by tying them to our other materials, in this case Percy and Birth of a Nation.
As a side note, you might want to take a look at this video produced by the Oxford Chamber of Commerce in 1987 and consider how some of the tensions between the selling of the South and the preservation of its culture remain a factor in our lives.
OXFORD - The Right Place from The Oxonians on Vimeo.
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The debates between New South Creed supporters and the Agrarians took place largely during the lifetime of William Alexander Percy. As a Southern intellectual, which of these two factions did Percy likely support? What evidence from Lanterns on the Levee provides support as to his preference?
ReplyDeleteIn chapter four of Cobb’s Away Down South Broadus Mitchell, author of The Rise of the Cotton Mills in the South, promised that his account was “not only an industrial chronicle, but a romance, a drama as well.” With industrialization being one of the key focuses that contributed to the South’s prosperity and growth, where does romance play a role?
ReplyDeleteIn the years surrounding WWI, historians began to produce Civil War histories. Outraged at what had been written by Northern historians, Southerners decided they must produce their own version of Civil War history. In what ways does the Southern response to Civil War history embody the Lost Cause? And how does the rewriting of Southern history in the years following WWI establish the end of the New South ideology?
ReplyDeleteIn the wake of the revolt against many who exposed contradictions in the New South Creed, many historians and intellectuals left the south for northern institutions that were not so hostile to their writings. These historians were able to "penetrate the exceedingly dense layer of mythology and romanticism that... postbellum writers and orators had so speedily and successfully laid down." What were the consequences of the "intellectual inertia" of the South at this time and of these subsequent intellectual migrations in reference to the sustainability of the New South Creed?
ReplyDeleteHow did the New South Creed propose to rebuild or improve "the devastating human and economic impact of the institution that supported them"? How did the slaveholding class change or adapt to the New South Creed?
ReplyDelete