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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - V. Politics - 21. Southern Conservatism and Liberalism - 2. Southern Conservatism - 3. Is the South Fascist?
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458 An American Dilemma
The South is also strongly religious. Not only is the nonchurch member
comparatively rare, but the denominations tend to be more fundamentalist
and evangelical than in the North. Although it would have to be checked
by carefully collected quantitative data, my impression is that the sermons
stress the Other World more often than this one and rely for a text more
often on the Old Testament than on the New Testament. It would seem
that the Southern white man, especially in the lower classes, goes to
church more to get an emotional thrill than to get an intellectual frame-
work into which to put his daily problems. These things are true in the
North, too, but to a much smaller extent. In spite of his other-worldliness
in church, the Southern preacher is often interested in power. Until recently
he was often quite important in local politics: during the I 920^s clergymen
may almost be said to have dominated the South. They were a potent force
behind the resuscitation of the Ku Klux Klan. They backed the ^‘Blue
Laws.” They dominated many universities. The Dayton trial, which was
fought over the question of teaching evolution in Tennessee, was only the
most spectacular manifestation of the general power of the fundamentalist
clergy.^®
3. Is THE South Fascist?
On account of the one-party system and the precarious state of civil
liberties, the South is sometimes referred to as fascist. This is, however,
wrong and just as wrong of the present as of the earlier South. The South
entirely lacks the centralized organization of a fascist state. Southern
politics is, on the contrary, decentralized and often even chaotic. The
Democratic party is the very opposite of a “state party” in a modern fascist
sense. It has no conscious political ideology, no tight regional or state
organization and no centralized and efficient bureaucracy. The “regimenta-
tion” which keeps the South politically solid is not an organization for
anything—least of all for a general policy—it is a regimentation against
the Negro. The South is static and defensive, not dynamic and aggressive.
Fundamentally the white Southerner is—^like the Negro, who is molded
in the same civilization—even more of an individualist and more of a
romantic than the Northerner. This is attested to by recent Southern
analysts of “the mind of the South.” The point has been particularly well
established and explained by W. J. Cash in his recent book of this title.^^
These characteristics are a survival of the frontier civilization of the South.
A ruling element of this tradition is “an intense distrust of, and, indeed,
downright aversion to, any actual exercise of authority beyond the barest
minimum essential to the existence of the social organism.”^"^ The South-
erner wants and expects a personal touch, a measure of arbitrariness, and.
than he has ever before witnessed. Will Rogers is said to remarked that “Mississippi
will hold faithful and steadfast to prohibition as long as the voters can stagger to the polls.*’
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