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Footnotes 1321
ing evolution of social culture or some masterpiece of narrative, charm and power are
revealed only through dramatic unfolding, episode upon episode, year upon year. Here is
a civilization slowly gathering together it«. processes and patterns until the magnitude of
the whole has been fashioned, nevertheless, whose power and brilliance are cumulative,
residing unescapably in separate units, yet also, and more, in the high potentiality of the
final unity.”*
A milder example may be taken from a more recent book of an outstanding Southern
liberal:
“Not content with such flagrant misrepresentations as the foregoing, certain profes-
sional Northerners delight in reading lectures to all Southerners for their ‘narrow-
mindedness,’ their ‘provincialism,’ and their general lack of decency and intelligence.
Such criticisms of the South are heard most often with respect to its handling of the
race problem. Fantastic statements in Northern magazines and newspapers, by self-con-
stituted authorities who know little or nothing about the subject, naturally contribute
only slightly to intersectional goodwill. For example, the following pontification appeared
not’ long ago in the editorial columns of the Lowell, Massachusetts, ^un: ^Any Negro in
the South who dares go near a polling booth on election day invites a bullet through
his brain. That is fact, not fiction.’ A Virginia editor promptly pointed out that many
thousands of Negroes vote every election day in the South, without any such retribution
as the Lowell paper declared to be universal, and three Northern-born residents of
Virginia protested the Sun^s extravagant assertion. The Massachusetts daily promptly
modified its charge with respect to Negro voting, but was equally absurd in its comment
upon one of the above mentioned letters. The author of the letter, a native New Eng-
lander, had declared, on the basis of residence in both Florida and Virginia, that ‘the
lot of the Southern Negro is no worse than that of the average Northern laborer.’ This
declaration, it is true, was distinctly vulnerable, but the Sun^s editor went to the
extreme length of saying, in rebuttal, that ‘no Northern laborer would for one moment
tolerate conditions under which the Southern Negro lives.’ He should have read the series
of newspaper articles by Harry Ashmore, a young South Carolina newspaperman, lovingly
describing the unspeakably foul slums of various Northern cities—a series which was
published with gusto in 1938 by more than a score of Southern dailies grown weary of
excursions by Northern journalists into the cabins and back alleys of the cotton belt.”*’
The present author was traveling in the South in the fall of 1938 when the out-
burst of anti-Semitism in Germany disheartened and infuriated liberals all over the
world. The Southern liberal newspapers—^and many of the conservative ones—^were out-
raged and denounced in no uncertain terms the barbarous actions taken by the German
Nazis against the Jews: the cheating and beating, the arbitrary justice, the discrimina-
tions against the Jews by attempts at residential segregation and Jim-Crowing in street-
cars, and beaches, in the labor market, in business. But the intellectual association to the
conditions of Negroes in America was skillfully and completely avoided. One liberal
editor with whom I discussed this point told me that such an association, if expressed,
would “altogether spoil the educational effect.” It had to be left to “the deeper forces
in the Southern soul” to make this comparison.
•Howard W. Odum, An American Efoch (1930), pp. 329-330, adapted in Howard W.
Odum and Harry E. Moore, American Regionalism (1938), pp. 521 and 523.
•Dabney, of, <Au^ pp. a 1-22.
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