1920—1970: The Era of Good Feelings

My synopsis of the history of the Southern people will henceforward be speculative. We may not have sufficient perspective now on the more recent past. There may be important undercurrents that are not noticed yet. 


I have called the half century after World War I an era of good feelings because, despite “Civil Rights” and other conflicts, it was a period when Southerners seemed to feel more comfortable as “Americans” and the rest of the country to accept them as such. 


Southerners were considered to be Americans, although with a bit of difference. The difference seemed to be accepted more favourably than previously. The South was often thought of as a seat of good times. Consider the popularity of two South Carolina dances - the “Charleston” in the 1920s and the “Shag” later on. Will Rogers, son of a Confederate officer, was one of the most popular of Americans and pioneered humourous radio commentary. 


Or consider such popular songs as “Nothin’ Could be Finah Than to Be in Carolina” or “Is It True What They Say about Dixie?.” And from the 1920s on, with radio, Southern music swept the civilised world. It was called “country and western” because that was more commercially viable than “Southern.”

  
“Gone with the Wind,” book and film, achieved international popularity. 


And during this era every thing important in American music came out of the South. And the greatest internationally recognised American literature was by Southerners. 


In the 1920s the South had some prosperity. Still it was said that the Great Depression of the 1930s was hardly noticed in the South because conditions were what had long been considered normal. And Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the South to be the No. 1 economic problem of the country. Genuine advance against endemic poverty did not really begin until after World War II and the South remains relatively the poorest region of America. 


During the troubled 1930s, Southern Agrarians in I’ll Take My Stand and Who Owns America? offered a humane Jeffersonian alternative to the existing reign of state capitalism and the offered remedy of socialism. Of course, their program had no chance in materialistic America, but it has remained an inspiration to many. And Big Business and progressivism combined in a coalition that became the ruling Deep State, combining state capitalism and socialism. As the Agrarians pointed out, they were simply two sides of a coin.  


Southerners embraced World War II and never showed the fascist tendencies of some other regions. Audie Murphy of Texas was the most decorated soldier and his fellow Texan Admiral Nimitz commanded the U.S. fleets in the Pacific. William Darby of Arkansas created the Army Rangers. Virginian George Patton was a spearhead of American forces in Europe and his fellow Virginian “Chesty” Puller was a Marine star. That is to mention only a few patriotic Southern contributions to the American cause. It was said that Japs hollered “To Hell with Roy Acuff!” before a charge and that Brits called the American air arm “the Royal Texas Air Force.” 


It does not seem that we got much credit or recognition for our service in that and later wars. In the postwar period the South was returned to its usual role as the red-headed stepchild and became the target of the Communist and other extreme left groups in Hollywood, the media, and among “intellectuals,” and Deep North politicians. Such people have always understood that Southerners are the only major obstacle to their agenda for America. 


Southern Democratic leadership in Congress - Richard Russell, Fritz Hollings, Sam Ervin, William Fulbright, Herman Talmadge - exercised considerable conservative influence on a country that moved leftward after World War II. Much more so than the Republican Party which never in its entire existence has conserved anything except corporate profits. The disappearance of the old-fashioned Southern Democrats has left the country with little check on leftward legislation.

 
George Wallace of Alabama won some Northern Democratic presidential primaries, forcing the Republicans reluctantly and insincerely to embrace the “social Issues” he had raised. He won 13% as an independent candidate in the national election of 1968, depriving both Nixon and Humphrey of a majority.  


Despite Civil Rights conflict, the Civil War Centennial observance in the 1960s was mostly an exhibit of good feelings. The war was treated usually as an American experience to be shared. President Eisenhower had a portrait of R.E. Lee in the Oval Office, The entrance of the Truman Presidential Library was adorned with an equestrian painting of Lee and Stonewall Jackson. John F. Kennedy was photographed making a speech in front of a Confederate flag.


The Diaspora. This is one of the most important matters in the history of the Southern people. Beginning with World I and up until fairly recent times several million black and white Southern people moved to the North and West, seeking a living. This is the opposite of recent times when affluent Northerners moved South to escape cold, taxes and crime. For a poignant view of Southern experience in the diaspora see Harriette Arnow, The Dollmaker. 


The Southern diaspora had some effect on the North where the more conservative areas have Southern settlement. The fate of black Southerners who moved North was on the whole unfortunate. The first generation of African American immigrants from the South worked hard, founded churches, and moved into the middle class. But dysfunctional ghettoes grew in the big cities among the Northern-born black people. Of course, the Yankee politicians and savants blamed the conditions the North had created on slavery and segregation in the South, despite the fact that the conditions are worse the further they are in distance and time from the South.  


When there were deadly race riots in Chicago and Detroit during World War II, the media blamed it on “Southern hillbillies,” people who had come there to work. Study indicates that the riots were between white ethnics and northern-born blacks - not a hillbilly in sight. Phony virtue signaling in regard to the race question has always been the Northern position. 


Of course, central to Southern history is the 1954 Supreme Court decision banning legal segregation and the Civil Rights events that followed. Southern white people were reluctant to give up the status quo they were familiar with and feared that enforced integration would lead to societal deterioration. 


But in the end a greatly significant happening in American history has been the quiet Southern acceptance of an integrated society. We will never be given credit, but generally speaking the South is the least segregated and most racially harmonious region of America. Before the 1970s it was never even admitted that race was a national and not just a Southern question. Nobody could claim that after the riots in Northern cities. Now there is a net migration of black Americans from the North back to South and they avow that they feel more comfortable in the South. 


In 1965 there were two events that promised perils for Southerners and indeed all Americans. The Civil Rights Act resulted in unprecedented federal interference and control in private society. The Immigration Act opened the way for an ongoing campaign to substitute Third Worlders for the American population. Both bills passed Congress with most Republicans voting for them and flattering themselves on their egalitarian and progressive virtue. All but a handful of the negative votes came from the South.  


The Civil Rights bill passed because it was assumed it was only to be applied to the South. It greatly expanded the power of Deep State bureaucrats and federal judges to further subvert the Constitution with exercise of irresponsible power. 


The next half century from 1970 would become a period of threat and trial for the Southern people.  ​

Donald Trump evidently cares about his fame. But no matter what the course of future history will be, Donald Trump will not be remembered as a “good” President. His abandonment of those of us who hoped he was the last chance for reform of the U.S. ruling regime guarantees that. Nor will he be remembered as a good man. His subservience to the Israeli agenda has destroyed the image of courage and independent thinking that many of us admired him for.


He has not cut spending. Every Republican president in the last half century has promised spending cuts and has lied, and Trump is the same. None of us understood what the “Big Beautiful Bill” was about and it seemed a surrender to the Establishment.


He has not refrained from foreign regime change adventures as he pledged to do.

He seems at times to be swinging blindly. Why concentrate on Venezuela and Greenland when the Ukrainian and Gaza disasters continue unalleviated? Provocation of Iran is a foolhardy enterprise.


No U.S. President or Congress can defy Israel but Trump is in a position where he might have exerted a bit of restraint.


Why the resistance to Epstein full exposure? Nobody thinks Trump is guilty of child molesting. Is he resisting exposure of other people to whom he is closely connected?


Yet we have to admit that he has done some good things. It is said that over 300,000 people have left the federal bureaucracy (although many of them have doubtless retired with fat pensions). How deep his reforms of the unconstitutional Deep State regime have gone and whether they will last remains to be seen.


He has brought some spirit of populism into the inert leadership of the Republican party. Is it enough or will they revert to their comfortable blank agenda?


His fooling around with tariffs, it is said, has brought $30 billion into the Treasury, raising a faint hope of control of the deficit. But it has not been sufficiently explained to the people. Is there hope that American industrial power is being renewed? Where is the evidence? I fear that the rising generations are little interested in acquiring skills and working hard. They have been raised in an economy in which financial manipulation, not production, is the path to wealth.


And the illegal immigrant issue has been addressed. We can be certain that no other possible President of either party would ever have addressed or even discussed this issue. That makes Trump a historic reformer, even as a failure, if nothing else.


As far as we can tell, the border has been made more secure and a lot of bad characters have been deported---possibly not nearly enough given the millions of illegals. The process has been poorly handled and Leninist revolutionaries have managed to bring it into question. Most Americans are in favour of removing illegals, but it has not been properly explained to them. “Virtuous” Republicans are running away from a policy that seems unrespectable and a threat to Midwestern niceness. The hope for removals may well be dead for the future.


Trump may have revealed that the administrative regime cannot be defeated and is our only possible future. And that it has made the Presidency too much for any one person.

Public officials in Minnesota - governor, attorney general, and mayor - are resisting enforcement of legitimate immigration law and encouraging their citizens to physically interfere with federal law enforcement. They have absurdly and perversely used States’ Rights arguments to justify their actions. There has even been ridiculous mention of the 10th Amendment which has been a dead letter for 175 years.


Not to be outdone in historical ignorance and distortion, the Republicans are taking them seriously. History professor V.D. Hanson, who became a celebrity Republican spokesman by superficially trashing Southerners as traitors, has just informed us that Minnesota governor Walz is a “Confederate.” Some other “conservative” writers have broadcast similar opinions.


Not surprising, since blaming Southerners for everything bad has been stock-in-trade for the Republican Party since its creation in the 1850s. The worst thing these people can think of to say about the Minnesota leftist insurgents is that they are “Southern.” Even though Minnesota is in every way probably the single most un-Southern State in the Union.


The historical misunderstanding of these “conservative” spokesmen is monumental and can only be explained by ignorance or malicious bias. The felon Republican celebrity commentator Dinesh D’souza started this nonsense a while back by calling the Democrats “the party of slavery and segregation.” That is true, but it is absolutely absurdly irrelevant to make that a reason for voting against today’s Democrats. This kind of superficial demagogic talking point is standard Republican talk. If these people had any shame they would not even pretend to be qualified to discuss history, but of course they have no shame.


When the Southern States seceded they elected delegates to a convention of the sovereign people. Both on the hustings and in the conventions the question was openly and vigourously discussed and secession won a majority of the voters. The conventions, just exactly like the conventions that had ratified the U.S. Constitution, repealed that ratification and were then out of the Union.


And of course States’ Rights and State sovereignty had been a major, perhaps even a majority, opinion in the entire life of the Union up to 1860, something Hanson and his imitators can’t seem to grasp. Secession was not revolutionary resistance to the federal government. It was a constitutional and democratic process until Lincoln declared that the States were simply gangs of lawbreakers.


​Why can’t these people face the fact that the Minnesota insurgents are acting out of a Leninist playbook for popular revolt? They prefer instead to trash us and our forebears. Tim Walz is not a Confederate. He is more like John Brown who thinks his righteousness allows him to engage in crime.