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Editorial Department
NATIONAL REVIEW
215 Lexington Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10016
July 27, 1999
Dear Sir:
In his recent article, Forrest McDonald refers to
a group of Americans he calls "southerners."
Who are these people? Hawaiians are southerners.
So are Puerto Ricans. All the vast population of
southern California is made up of southerners. That
is, each of these groups comes from what is geographically
the southern part of the United States. But McDonald
does not seem to be referring to any of them. He
is talking about the losing side in the Civil War,
which does not include any of these people.
Before McDonald, National Review had
many, many articles dealing with Southerners, a
regional group which has the identity McDonald seems
to be referring to. But it is simply wrong, not
to mention insulting to some of us, to refer to
our region as "the south," or to us as
"southerners." I realize that Russell
Kirk invented a schizophrenic system of capitalizing
"the South" and writing "southern"
in the lower case. This is absolutely unique and
idiosyncratic, and amounts to nothing more than
bad spelling. I would appreciate National Review
continuing to refer to my people as Southerners.
We have a history and a culture which is worthy
of that much respect.
Sincerely,
Robert W. Whitaker
Forrest McDonald is one of those people who has
gotten a great reputation for defending dead Southerners
in history. He therefore has a lot of valuable capital
that can be used by liberals and respectable conservatives
in their present battle against living Southerners.
His latest article in National Review shows how
that sort of capital can be used.
In real world politics, words are
the main weapon. One of the first victories of the
civil rights movement was when blacks got publications
to stop writing "negro" and got the word
capitalized. This looks tiny, but actually it was
very important. It showed that, by the 1940s, there
was a black reading public, and publications recognized
that.
Exactly the same thing happened in
the case of the Jews. There was a time when "jew"
was freely used as a verb. There was a time when
writers freely used the uncapitalized terms "jews"
and "jewish." Once again, it was a major
victory when the ADL and other groups managed to
end this disrespectful lack of capitalization of
the title of a legitimate identity group.
I hate this campaign to put "Southern"
in the lower case, because I feel so absolutely
alone in being against it. If you look, you will
see that it is spreading steadily. There was a time
when even our enemies would capitalize "the
South" and "Southerners." But more
and more, especially with the help of people like
McDonald, the campaign to take away this recognition
of our identity is gaining ground.
If we allow this trivialization of
Southern identity to advance, we cannot win the
bigger battle. If it weren't worth doing, our enemies
wouldn't be doing it.
An otherwise sincerely pro-Southern
Yankee, Russell Kirk, gave a big boost to this "southern"
business. He used a really weird system of capitalization
in his 1951 book "John Randolph of Roanoke."
He capitalized "South" but not "Southerners."
This nonsense of putting "southern"
and "southerners" in the lower case was
a complete invention by Kirk. It is simply absurd,
and it is simply bad spelling. Absolutely nobody
capitalizes the name of a group, like Jews, and
then uses the small letter in the adjective: You
NEVER say "Jews are jewish." Such things
are only invented by people who want to make a semi-apology
for the South.
Kirk's schizophrenic nonsense was
one of those totally weird attempts to appease those
who hate the South. It was like the insane business
of abandoning the flag on the South Carolina dome
for a square Confederate flag (Please see July 24
article, "Why So Many Right Wingers Go Nuts").
And our enemies know how to capitalize
fully on such apologies. Every enemy of the Confederate
flag now uses the term "navy jack," which
was coined by OUR apologizers*,
to put down the flag on the South Carolina capitol.
Actually there was at least one diagonal Confederate
battle flag like the one on the state house dome,
while the navy jack was one-third farther across
than the one on the state house dome. So the modern,
diagonal Confederate flag is NOT a navy jack. But,
in their desperation to apologize, the people on
our side have given our enemies this club to beat
us with, and there is no way we will ever correct
this.
Those who want to put all references
to our identity in small letters -- and all references
to other, "real," groups in capitals --
know how to use Southern apologizers. Just as flag
opponents all use "navy jack" to put down
the Confederate flag, these people find the Kirk-McDonald
apology for "southerners" highly useful.
Before Forrest McDonald's article,
National Review always correctly referred to those
of us who are part of the South as Southerners.
For no reason whatsoever, McDonald has now changed
that, and has made a major contribution to the campaign
to refer to a group called "southerners,"
which puts us in the same category as Hawaiians,
Angelenos, and Puerto Ricans. Since conservatives
constitute the only group which might actually show
some respect for our Southern identity, this was
a major blow for those of us who are still Southerners.
*An "apologist" is "one
who speaks or writes in defense of a faith, a cause,
or an institution." An apologist is the exact
opposite of an apologizer.
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