
          Myth, Media, and the Southern Mind By Stephen
A. Smith (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986.)
          By Egerton, JohnJohn Egerton
          Vol. 9, No. 1, 1987, pp. 15-16
          
          If anything is more prolific than kudzu in the South, it's
mythology. The collective imagination of Southerners--romantic,
gothic, adventurous, heroic, humorous, instructive--has thrived in
courtroom and classrooms, pulpits and porch swings, since the
plantation South emerged as a self-conscious entity in the wake of the
American Revolution.
          Social psychologists and psychiatrists and philosophers have never
come up with a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. We don't
know why Southerners thrive on stories, parables, imagination,
rhetoric, exaggeration, legend, mythology--but they do, and they
always have. Myth is embedded in the fiction and poetry, the newspaper
and magazine writing, the song lyrics, the preaching, the language of
lawyers and judges, the letters, the oral tradition, the ritual,
ceremonies, the radio and television programming, the advertising.
          It's even in the history. "I may not have the facts just exactly
right," a keeper of useful myths of Southern history once explained to
me at the end of a long and winding tale, "but what I've told you is
the honest truth." In a more negative vein, the South has also
suffered from some historians whose myths and facts bore little
resemblance to the truth.
          Think of the descriptive names the South has gone by--how sweeping,
how colorful, how misleading: Old South, New South, Deep South, Solid
South, Populist, Progressive, Agrarian, Bourbon, Jim Crow
South. Moonlight and magnolias, gentlemen of honor, ladies on
pedestals, happy darkies singing in the cotton fields, belles and
beaus glorifying the Confederacy, the Lost Cause, the pride of
Dixieland. The intertwining tendrils of fantasy embrace and encompass
reality in the South like wisteria on a backyard door.
          All of which makes a book like Stephen A. Smith's Myth,
Media, and the Southern Mind so useful and welcome. Smith is a
University of Arkansas professor of communications and rhetoric and a
former staff aide to some Arkansas politicans. He has been immersed in
rhetoric both as a scholar and as a specialist for skilled
practictioners of the art; he is an ideal person to analyze
and interpret the cultural myths that have dominated the historic and
contemporary South.
          To set the stage for his major points, Smith devotes the first
three chapters of his book to a synthesis of Southern history and to
his own careful and persuasive reinterpretation of it. At the risk of
oversimplifying his own simplification of a complex story, let me
compress his narrative into a few brief paragraphs:
          The South didn't emerge as a discrete, distinct region until after
the Revolution. By the early 1800s--fully two centuries after
Jamestown--the forces of slavery, agrarianism, economics, and
geography were slowly beginning to shape the Southern social
order. Institutions of politics, religion, education, and business
reinforced the identity. As the century wore on and the South lost
control of Congress, the White_House, and public opinion, an
oppression psychosis set in; the white aristocrat's way of life was
under attack, and his response was aggressively defensive. The
planter-politician-businessman enforced a uniform white attitude based
on loyalty and honor and fear, and though there were whites who did
not agree, they were effectively intimidated into silent
acquiescence.
          Through the crucial middle decades of the nineteenth century,
through the Civil_War and Reconstruction and the resurgence of white
supremacy, one petrifying and imprisoning myth after another kept the
white South solid. Turning defeat and humiliation into pride and
nostalgia for the "good old days," the ruling planters
turned-"colonels" learned to glorify defeat, to justify bigotry, and
to purify their hearts with religious and literary
mythology. "Separate but equal" was invented in this

pre-twentieth-century period.
          Henry Grady's "New South" movement of the 1880s was a variation on
this theme in that it tried to define the region's future, not its
past--but as Paul Gaston made abundantly clear in The New South Creed,
the Grady Bunch managed to cling to white_supremacy and the Southern
status quo. The Populist movement of the same period did try to
redefine the Southern past, and for a brief time its leaders sought to
elevate democracy by uniting the powerless majority of whites and
blacks But Jim Crow leaders fumed the movement around, and egalitarian
yeomen became racist demogogues. Southern Progressives of the 1920s
fared no better, and the literary Agrarians of the 1930s were
unabashed reactionaries who yearned for antebellum white paternalism
and privilege.
          It was not until the 1940s that the white_supremacy myth showed the
first signs of weakness. The democratizing influences of the New_Deal
and World_War_II stirred Dixiecrat reaction, and when that failed,
increasingly alarmed racists dusted off some antique myths--massive
resistance, interposition, nullification--to hold the tide. But the
solid South of the White supremacists began to lose its powerful grip
as black resistance swelled, the courts compelled change, the nation
and the world condemned racism, and more Southern whites joined the
crusade against racism.
          The old guard said it was the end of the South, but wiser
Southerners observed that it was only the end of the myth--and out of
that notion came the impulse to create new myths and symbols and
rhetoric suitable for the modern South.
          The second half of Stephen Smith's provocative book identifies
three new mythic themes in the contemporary South: equality,
distinctiveness, and a sense of place and community. These ideas
aren't developed as thoroughly as they might have been, and that is
perhaps the weakness of the book. But Smith's modern themes, like his
synthesis of Southern history, may serve the purpose he intended: not
to present a definitive argument, but simply to introduce a new way of
looking at things.
          The theme of equality involves a revision of history, a
redefinition: the rediscovery of libertarian documents (the
Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights) advanced by Southern
Presidents (Jefferson, Madison); the impulse of Jacksonian Democracy;
the prophetic dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the "separate but equal" ruling
of 1896. Smith cites historians such as C. Vann Woodward and George
Tindall, journalists such as Ralph McGill and Harry Ashmore,
politicians such as Terry Sanford and LeRoy Collins, and activists led
by Martin_Luther_King Jr. and many others as the vanguard of a new
Southern tradition of equality.
          In support of his second new theme, distinctiveness, Smith argues
that the South is still different from the rest of the country, as it
always has been--but now often in positive ways, from its music, food,
language to its literature and oral traditions. This and the final
theme--the sense of place and community (by which he means such
characteristics as family ties, attachment to land and nature,
etc.)--are harder to sustain as examples of a new mythology. In fact,
Smith acknowledges that growth and other manifestations of
contemporary Southern life pose serious threats to the survival of a
progressive new mythology in the heart of Dixie.
          Understanding the cultural myths that thrive in a society is an
important step in the direction of understanding reality--the true
meaning of our past, present, and future. Thanks to Stephen Smith's
insightful book, we have more much-needed help in understanding the
once and future South.
        
