South mouth: why liberals hate Dixie

National Review, April 21, 1997 by Florence King

IN 1906, Varina Howell Davis, widow of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, died in New York. She had moved there for financial reasons after her husband's death in 1889. Needing to earn her living but reluctant to embarrass her fellow Mississippians by doing it in their midst, she accepted an offer from her cousin's husband, Joseph Pulitzer, to review books for his paper.

Now that New York Gov. George Pataki has ripped the Georgia state flag from the Albany capitol, it is instructive to learn how an earlier New York responded to the passing of the First Lady of the Confederacy.

Her funeral, described in Gerry Van der Heuvel's excellent biography, stopped traffic:

New York honored Varina without any prompting. . . . The mayor sent an escort of mounted police to accompany her body to the station, where it was placed aboard a special train [to Richmond]. The casket was draped in the Confederate flag. A military band marched before the hearse playing "Dixie," "Maryland, My Maryland," and "The Bonnie Blue Flag." . . . General Frederick Grant, son of the Union general-in-chief, ordered a company of artillery from Governors Island to escort the cortcge. This was the first time in history federal troops had accorded this honor to a woman.

It is a commentary on our times that this passage could serve as a checklist of all the things that are now in the process of being banned.

Attitudes were different in 1906. Back then, the North held the Old Confederacy in high esteem. The halcyon days of Southern good repute had begun almost immediately after the Civil War. The image-makers were Union veterans, whose stories of Confederate valor spread respect for the former enemy at a time when Americans invested the good loser with nobility and the martial grand gesture stirred every schoolboy's heart.

By the end of the nineteenth century memories were fading and veterans were dying off, but the South won the country's admiration again in 1898 when war with Spain broke out. Southerners enlisted in droves, earning ardent tributes to their patriotism. The spirit of 1898, when Northern and Southern men fought side by side under the American flag for the first time since the Mexican War, lingered into the twentieth century and explains the send-off New York gave Varina Davis.

The era of good feeling ended when America contracted South Mouth, a recurring infection that causes its sufferers to spout criticism, drip invective, ooze sanctimony, and chew rugs.

It began in 1925 with the Scopes "Monkey Trial" in Dayton, Tennessee, when fundamentalist Christians succeeded in banning the teaching of evolution. Liberal intellectuals, who had caught Midwest Mouth when Sinclair Lewis published Main Street and Babbitt a few years earlier, now had a whole Southful of Bible-quoting hicks to make fun of.

Once the Depression and the New Deal got underway, South Mouth turned into a pandemic with something for every taste. Communists had lynching, socialists had sharecropping, unions had textile barons, social-workers had Appalachia ("the South's South"), political scientists had Huey Long, geneticists had the novels of Erskine Caldwell, liberals had segregation, and Eleanor Roosevelt had everything.

During World War II, race riots in Detroit and Chicago were blamed on Southerners who had moved North. In the Fifties the South was constantly reminded that "the eyes of the world" were trained on the school integration struggle, and in the Sixties that its response to the civil-rights movement was being tried in "the court of world opinion" -- lofty threats that South Mouth was going global.

The Seventies seemed to hold out hope, but Southerners who thought the election of Jimmy Carter had any meaning beyond Watergate were soon disabused. In deference to the new President, the media exchanged malignant South Mouth for benign South Mouth.

It showed in their mantralike repetition of the false claim that Carter was "the first Southern President since the Civil War." Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, in 1856 and grew up in Georgia, making him the first and only President to lose his American citizenship, but that pales beside his other credentials. Wilson, after all, was president of Princeton and governor of New Jersey, which proves that he was polished and urbane and hence not a "real" Southerner like Jimmy Carter.

South Mouth eased up when the Left discovered multiculturalism. Beginning in the Eighties, the South was absorbed into broader categories of villainy such as "Eurocentrism," "Dead White Males," and "angry white men." At last Southerners and ethnic Catholics got a chance to bond; now we were all Europeans together.

Evidently the multiculturalists just realized their error, because South Mouth is back.

A suspicious suddenness surrounds the current outbreak. It started less than a year ago when the Citadel lost its court battle over admitting women and the decision spilled over onto the Virginia Military Institute. The defeat of these two bastions of everything Southern seemed to send the Left into a foaming frenzy.