
          Fred Hobson. Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to
Explain, Louisiana State University Press, 1983.
          By Gorn, ElliottElliott Gorn
          Vol. 5, No. 6, 1983, 20-21
          
          I recently attended a workshop for historians held at a Southern
university. One scholar, who teaches in New_York state and whose field
of study is Latin America, confided to me that he couldn't understand
all the fuss over the South. Most of those attending the workshop were
Southerners, and their teaching and writing focused on their native
region. My newfound friend was sure they were wasting their time. At
best, the South deserved passing notice as a slight national
aberration, to be quickly discussed and dismissed in general United
States history classes. While not primarily a Southernist, I argued
that slavery, Jim Crow, staple agriculture, enduring folk traditions,
rurality, and other factors all contributed to a distinct Southern
past. I failed to convince him. The next time I find myself slipping
into such a fruitless discussion, I'll save my breath and hand over a
copy of Fred Hobson's Tell About the South. If Hobson
fails to convince, the case is hopeless.
          Hobson's fine book concerns a strangely neglected subject, or
perhaps more accurately a subject which scholars frequently skirt but
rarely address frontally. Tell About the South, as its
subtitle implies, concerns "The Southern Rage to Explain." Not the
contours of history or the aesthetics of fiction, but Southern
consciousness--the awareness of being Southern--is Hobson's
theme. Apologias, jeremiads, calls for reform, justifications, paeans
of praise, all were united by their author's impassioned, even
feverish consciousness of Southern identity. A professor of English,
Hobson reaches beyond short stories and novels to include essays,
tracts, speeches, journalism, polemics, even sociology, in a sub-genre
of South-centered writing.
          Hobson is not a newcomer to his subject. His much praised
Serpent in Eden: H. L. Mencken and the South, and this
year's Lillian_Smith Award winner, South Watching: Selected
Essays of Gerald W. Johnson establish his credentials as a
capable scholar of Southern Studies. But Tell About the South leaps
beyond these monographs to a comprehensive discussion of a dozen and a
half of the region's most penetrating and influential commentators. It
is the bringing together of pre-Civil_War spokesman like George
Fitzhugh, Edmund Ruffin, and Hinton Helper, voices from the post
bellum industrializing South such as Thomas Nelson Page, Howard Odum,
Donald Davidson and Wilbur Cash, along with Southerners of the Civil
Rights era like Lillian_Smith, Richard Weaver and James McBride Dabbs,
which gives the book its sweep and power.
          Hobson's prose is always highly readable, and at times moving. But
both style and substance are at their best in the book's midsection,
the era spanning the last third of the nineteenth century and the
first third of the twentieth. Here social and moral conflicts haunted
Southern thinkers, conflicts which spurred the imaginations of great
novelists from Twain to Faulkner. The moral dilemma of slavery in a
world obsessed with equality was difficult enough. The outcome of the
Civil_War simply added tangled new problems to explain or interpret:
Defeat, humiliation, and impoverishment; a twinkling of racial justice
snuffed out as suddenly as it appeared; industrialization,
urbanization and a new spirit of capitalist boosterism, amidst tenant
farm and milltown squalor.
          Hobson places his dramatic personae in two broad categories of
Southern thought which he labels the school of guilt and shame and the
school of remembrance, the former critical, introspective, often
liberal, the latter celebratory, nostalgic and conservative. Thus, in
the antebellum period we have George Fitzhugh and Edmund Ruffin
defending slavery and the plantation ethos against the assaults of the
modernizing North, while Hinton Helper railed against slavery and
eventually the entire black race as impediments to the advancement of
the poor white majority. A century later, Richard M. Weaver took his
conservative stand for a traditional Southern ethic--including a
mistrust of abstraction, idealism and progress, a knowledge of tragedy
and failure, and a love of place, nature, the spoken word and all that
was tangibly Southern--while Lillian_Smith wrote prophetically on the
human destructiveness of racial and sexual segregation.
          But it was the era of Jim Crow beginning late in the nineteenth
century through the Northern assault on the "benighted" South during
the 1920s and 1930s which produced not just critics or defenders, but
great and self-conscious dialogues on the meaning of the South. As the
region underwent the most intense period of economic transformation,
pairs of antagonists took it upon themselves to define the meaning of
the South for their contemporaries. Each developed a group of
followers, and the opposing sides helped shape and define each
other. Thus, Thomas Nelson Page eulogized the life of the old upper
South for its heroism, gentility and grace, all those qualities which
made Robert E. Lee a representative man. But his distant cousin,
Walter Hines Page, looked with a more jaundiced eye on what he
considered sloth, intellectual sterility, poverty, and the dangers of
growing industrialization. By the 1920s the focus shifted to Southern
universities, particularly Vanderbilt and North_Carolina, as
Southerners responded to the Northern intellectual community's attack
on their region's racial, intellectual, and religious "backwardness."
Donald Davidson led the agrarians of I'll Take My Stand
against the liberal modernizing juggernaut they saw embodied in Howard
Odum and the Southern sociologists. Here the defense shifted from the
aristocratic South to the conservative values of the deep South's
plain folk, while the social scientists who criticized their own
region sought ways to merge economic and social progress with enduring
rural ways. By the eve of the second World War, Wilbur J. Cash and
William Alexander Percy become the leading antagonists in the drama,
the former assuming the mantle of reform, the latter writing in an
elegiac manner on the lost life of the Delta aristocrat.
          A review cannot possibly capture the depth and subtlety which
Hobson brings to his subject. Above all what comes through in his work
is the passion of these writers for telling about the South. Not what
they said but the way they said it was crucial:
          
            The radical need of the Southerner to explain 

and interpret
the South is an old and prevalent condition, characteristic of
Southern writers since the 1840s and 1850s when the region first
became acutely self-conscious. The rage to explain is understandable,
even inevitable, given the South's traditional place in the
nation--the poor, defeated, guilt-ridden member, as C. Vann Woodward
has written, of a prosperous, victorious and successful family. The
Southerner, more than other Americans, has felt he had something to
explain, to justify, to defend or to affirm.
          
          Personal and regional identity merged. Prophets, Jeremiahs,
patriots, all were possessed by the need to explain their cause and
give it meaning:
          
            If apologist for the Southern way, he was felt driven to
answer the accusations and misstatements of outsiders and to combat
the image of a benighted and savage South. If native critic, he has
often been preoccupied with Southern racial sin and guilt, with the
burden of the Southern past--and frustrated by the closed nature of
Southern society itself, by the quality which suppressed dissent arid
adverse comment.
          
          William Faulkner's Quentin Compson in Absalom,
Absalom is Hobson's prototype for the Southerner obsessed with
telling the tale. Like the fictional Compson, four of the writers
discussed by Hobson finished their story then took their own lives.
          There are, of course, criticisms to be made. Tell About the
South is occasionally repetitious. Moreover, the dialogue
Hobson traces is primarily between liberals and conservatives. One
wonders how the Southern radical tradition fits in, especially the
populist voices at the turn of the century. I also suspect that
Hobson's implied eulogy for the passionate Southerner amidst sunbelt
blight is a bit premature; commercialism and hype have not completely
drowned out the voices of enraptured Southerners. But all of this is
quibbling. Tell About the South is an important book
about an important subject.
          
            Elliott Gorn is assistant professor of American Studies
at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
          
        
