How nostalgic literature became an agent in American racism
27 AUGUST 2015
BY SARAH CHURCHWELL
... An essential aspect of the history of American racism is also the history of its deliberate mystification. Many Americans continue to accept an idealised view of the antebellum and Jim Crow South, which emerged as part of a national romance known as the Lost Cause, a legend that turned terrorism into a lullaby. In the aftermath of the South’s crushing defeat in the civil war, southerners began trying to reclaim what they had lost – namely, an old social order of unquestioned racial and economic hierarchies. They told stories idealising the nobility of their cause against the so-called War of Northern Aggression, in which northerners had invaded the peaceful South out of a combination of greed, arrogance, ignorance and spite. Gentle southerners heroically rallied to protect their way of life, with loyal slaves cheering them all the way. This Edenic dream of a lost agrarian paradise, in which virtuous aristocrats and hard-working farmers coexisted peacefully with devoted slaves, pre-dated the war: merging with Jeffersonian ideals of the yeoman farmer, it formed the earliest propagandistic defences of slavery. One of the most powerful broadsides against this spurious fantasy was launched in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a north-eastern preacher’s daughter who had lived in border states and seen what really happened to fugitive slaves. The South responded to Uncle Tom’s Cabin with a furious denunciation of Stowe’s knowledge and motives, insisting on the benevolence of their “peculiar institution” – an especially sordid euphemism that recast plantation slavery as an endearing regional quirk.
nce institutional slavery was irrevocably destroyed, nostalgia prevailed, and southerners began producing novels, poems and songs romanticising the lost, halcyon days of the antebellum era. Reaching their apotheosis in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind in 1936, and its film version in 1939, they have become known as the “moonlight and magnolia” school of plantation fiction, exemplified by the novels of Thomas Nelson Page, whose books, such as In Ole Virginia (1887) and Red Rock (1898), helped establish the formula: devoted former slaves recount (in dialect) their memories of an idyllic plantation culture wantonly destroyed by militant northern abolitionists and power-crazed federalists. A small band of honourable soldiers fought bravely on the battlefield and lost; the vindictive North installed incompetent or corrupt black people to subjugate the innocent whites; southern scalawags and northern carpetbaggers descended to exploit battle-ravaged towns. Pushed to the limits of forbearance, the Confederate army rose again to defend honour and decency – in the noble form of the Ku Klux Klan ...
http://www.newstatesman.com/world/north-america/2015/08/how-nostalgic-literature-became-agent-american-racism
