The "Soul" of America

In a recent production about the American South, that region’s culture is celebrated. It has contributed to the music, cuisine, sports and many other elements of our American culture. Interviews with people of the South finally concluded with the assertion that “the South is the soul” of America.

The South has always been a curious and interesting place. It has made contributions of significance, in the above noted fields as well as literature, science, philosophy and religion, and, yet, it has been only in recent years that light has been shown in what was for a long time a dark and mysterious place. It has been exposed to the light of day because of better travel after World War II and better communications. It has also been opened up to the world, thanks to air conditioning and, not a small matter, collegiate football and television. It has sights, tastes, sounds and smells which delight our senses.

Of interest to me was that the entire program never talked about the Antebellum South. It’s as if that part of their history never existed. Normally, when travelling through the area, that’s one of the things we like to see, the Old South and its aristocracy. What the program presented was more the other side of the South, the poor to middle class, children of people who worked hard to eke out a life and living in a hard place in a hard time.

They spoke about the damage done to the psyche of the South when they lost the Civil War. Entire towns were burned, one-fourth of the southern men of fighting age were lost. There were other horrendous casualties of the war. (Nor did they dwell on the failed Reconstruction policies following the war.) At no time, however, did anyone ever suggest that perhaps their political leaders, those of the Antebellum Aristocracy, should not have picked that fight.

Another deafening silence in the program was the failure to mention hardly at all the very significant number of African-Americans in the South. There was a famous Black football player interviewed, as well as a college professor, the mention of the Blues music scene in Memphis and the obligatory Black choir singing spirituals. The only mention of slavery was in the context of a slave who took his master’s steamship and delivered it to the Union Navy. He was commended as a hero by Abraham Lincoln and after the war he returned to his home in South Carolina where he bought his former master’s home and was elected to Congress. There were a lot of Blacks in the South who did not get to walk the halls of Congress.

I love the South. I never considered my state to be part of the South; it was more a part of the Southwest. But, my roots run deep in the Confederacy. When we celebrate it, or any region of our great country, we should discuss it, warts and all.