Bob..do you consider the southern culture a FAILED ideology?
Comment by Kelly
ME:
Back when National Review was still trying to get some Southern support, they published an article by a then-buddy of mine who started the Southern Partisan, for which I was a Senior Editor. The Article was called, “The Death of the Yankee Culture.”
That death went unannounced and unnoticed, but if you want to see the memory of it, you can look at Thurston P. Howell on “Gilligan’s Island.”
It was the rule of the Cabot Lodges and the Haahvahd people that was at its height under Coolidge. They are gone with the wind. In fact, there wasn’t even a wind.
The Old South itself was a stupid FAILURE. From the time Washington assumed office in in 1789, the Federal Government’s was entirely supported by tariffs. If you think that just meant New England got a free rise, you are being naive.
New England’s main profit from Our Glorious Union was not just that the South paid for the whole government, but that they got even more money because the South had to them more for THEIR products to avoid tariffs.
From the word go, we agreed to be New England’s colonies. Southerners kept refusing to take the ultimate step and seceded until Lincoln was lected and our colonial status was absolute.
We were crushed and we became outright Yankee colnies. Discriminatory railroad rates kept industry outo f the South and the South impoverished until they were finally abolished in — get this — 1951!
Until then it cost several times as much to send industrial products NORTH as to send them South!
Like the Death of the Yankee Culture, no one knows about this now.
As to what Southern Culture might be, it was New England that was the Bible Belt before the Civil War. The crushed, impoverished, defeated South went Old Testament AFTER the War.
The old Southern Culture WAS represented by outposts like New Orleans which WAS the only place in America where you could carry your mixed drink right down the street or on the bus with you. It was representd by the open bars in Charleston when the rest of the state had to obey a STATE-WIDE ban on mixed drinks.
We were WILD. At the South Carolina College, faculty was terrified of students who carried weapons.
But we were very, very polite. An armed society tends to be that way. In the first issue of the London Times in 1785, I read about a duel. It said both men acquitted themselves bravely and no one was hurt.
Southern duels almost always left somebody DEAD. As he fell dead, he would usually wound the other guy.
I am a Bible Belter AND an Old Southerner. So when you say “Southern culture” you are desribing several different things to me.
The South in the Union as one of the stupidest failures in human history.
But we’re still here.
The Yankees aren’t.
#1 by cuykendalld@charter.net on 08/27/2006 - 3:06 am
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Kelly’s question about Southern culture as a failed ideology is a fascinating subject.
For example, I grew up outside of the Fort Lewis military reservation in Washington State.
My neighborhood was full of Southerners because of the military and the military has played a big role in propagating Southern culture and attitudes throughout the inland areas (and military base areas) of the U.S.
As a child I quickly found out that as a Westerner, Southerners did not consider me a Yankee.
Of course, living in a rural area as I did, I grew up in gun culture and always had and carried guns. Nothing has changed with the gun culture and where it thrives (which in the West and down South) except it is a lot harder for kids to have guns.
The advent of the “New South” was not limited to the South.
Seattle underwent the same transformation at the same time, as did the U.S. as a whole, which implemented the juggernaut of Political Correctness.
A big difference, however, in the West, as opposed to the South, was (and, is today) labor unions and wage levels.
But today, in my State of Washington, in the rural areas, Confederate flags are flying all over the place. This is true in Northern Idaho also.
That tells you a lot about the persistence of this failed culture and what is going on today.
#2 by Shari on 08/27/2006 - 1:26 pm
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We used to have something like that kind of freedom in Montana in the 60’s Open container laws were waived for rodeos, fairs, street dances. You could get a drivers license at 15 with no “drivers ed” Of course that wasn’t needed as most were driving before 15,just not in town. And of course we didn’t have a “gun” problem and almost everybody had some. But our state is now taken over by laws and laws and laws and people put posters in their windows call STREAMS, Where Rivers and Cultures Meet. But we now live in a university town and it’s bad here.