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mm from Gainesville, Florida. Hello, I'm Mike Cannon, and this is conversation. If one were to take all the mental pictures that form the regional mythology of the South, I suppose that two principal myths would stand out. The first is the so called plantation myth, the myth of white columned mansions, green pastures, expansive cotton and tobacco fields.

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A place where the kindly old monster with his mint julep, uh, is sitting on the porch watching happy darkies who are singing in the fields while coquettish bells wooed by slender gallants in gray underneath the moonlight and magnolias give that extra touch to the so called plantation myth.

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And there is that other principal myth developed by another mind and another intention. And it is the myth of scrub cotton and sharecropper shacks of razorback hogs and night riders of backwoods and sandhills sub humanity, a place where gentle old master became the arrogant, haughty, imperious, potent eight who bred blacks like cattle separating families of that served his purpose, while Southern women suffered in silence the guilty knowledge of their men's infidelity, a place where oppressed people longed for freedom, which one of those myths is true If and this is perhaps the more telling question if either is true.

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And does this list of two myths exhaust what might be said about the mythology of the South? All of these are questions that will be asking when I return in a moment with my guest conversation from the University of Florida, a discussion of social, political, scientific and religious issues of the day.

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Your host is Dr Michael Vegan in Ring professor of Ethics, an assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. My guest on this conversation is Dr George B. Tendo Keenan professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, former president of the Southern Historical Association.

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Dr Tendo, welcome to conversation. Thank you. You are visiting our campus, participating in some of the classes in our university, giving a lecture to students and faculty on the past and future of the South. And I thank you for coming to join me this evening on conversation.

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Those two myths I drew from some of your writings and I'd like to discuss if you will for a moment the concept of myth and the South one gets the impression that the two areas in the United States that that had been dominated by mythology have been the South and the Old West or the Far West.

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Uh, would you say that that's the case? I think that's the case, and I think the midst of the South are a lot more complex than than the midst of the West. There's a lot more variety in them, and I think one thing it would be useful to say at the outset is well is to define myth.

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There are different ways in which it's used, and I think most people, when you say myth, just think you mean something that that ain't so. It's false. I think that that derives from way back the the early Christian era, when the Greek and Roman myths were looked upon as just something that was false.

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But even they convey a lot of truth, and I think we have all of us carry around a sort of mental baggage of social myths that that have while their images of what our people are or what are people ought to be that sometimes are they are pretty tough stuff.

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They are generally grounded in reality, it's not necessarily something that's false, but they always carry some hazard of falsehood. The abolitionist Smith, for example, uh, portraying the South as almost entirely degraded and primitive and lacking in any redeeming virtue. There is something wrong with that. Well, that it has.

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It has some touch with reality. I don't think anybody can. There are few people left who would try to defend slavery any longer. Uh, the These myths, though I think, are pretty firmly fixed in the minds of most Americans, North and South, and most people recognize them right away.

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You could say they've been implanted to some extent by some rather forceful dramatic presentations, and the two images you get a good way of summarizing them would be It's the Gone with the wind, sunny South image versus, say roots or for some earlier cultural events in our history that served to fix those notions in the popular mind.

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It's It's a Uncle Tom's cabin on the one hand, and the picture that you get in birth of a nation, on the other hand, and I think much of the mythology of the South turns to some extent on this, and it all originated in the in the sectional conflict back in the last century that preceded the Civil War.

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The remarkable thing, though, is the tenacity of these these ideas about South and I think they both have large elements of truth in them. And, of course, they have large elements of falsehood. 11 curious thing is the the blind spot that appears in both of the myths.

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And that is the small time Southern yeoman white yeoman farmer. He doesn't whichever myth you turn to, that's sort of the ragtag and bobtail the pullback ra as the blacks sometimes called him. They don't appear in either one of these these pictures, curiously, the rednecks I want.

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I want somebody to tell me someday when that term originated. I don't think it was. It was around much before the turn of the century, the turn of this present century. It's, I haven't I haven't encountered it back. There are a is the term that blacks had for poor whites.

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So commonly, uh, the theory of the yeoman worker as being the majority figure in the South before the Civil War was recently developed by Frank Townsley Uh, and yet did not W. J cash in the mind of the South come to something of the same conclusion when he said that several years ahead of Owsley, Yes, that there really was not Southern aristocracy.

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Rather, these were the so called poor whites who succeeded. He was the man at the center. That's what Cash called him. Very interesting that that image of aristocracy living in white column Georgian homes was never an aristocracy. As such, they were pioneers who had emigrated into the interior.

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They were all pretty new. Mark Twain attributed that to so many Southerners reading Sir Walter Scott and those medieval romances about the the British aristocracy. Well, there are, I'm sure some true pictures that come out of that plantation myth the beautiful home, the green pastures surely certainly are examples of that.

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Yes, and the beautiful bells in their hoop skirts. And surely the black slaves must have sung at one time or another. But it was not an endless movie like Gone with the wind. It was filled with many tragedies and sad tales. On the other hand, as I asked a moment before, I'd like to get back to that?

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What about the abolitionist picture of the South? Is it all true? No, but a great deal of it is true and that that is sort of the That's the reverse side of the coin. Much of it is quite the same picture except the in the selection you you read their.

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At the outset, the kindly old master becomes the imperious Putin Tate and on most of these things, the the happy darkies singing in the cotton fields. Then they become an oppressed people who are trying to follow the North Star to freedom all the time. And it's just a matter of the different perceptions.

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I don't know that the truth is somewhere halfway in between them, but both were. These things become a real force historical force in people's minds because they become not only pictures of what are people are and so on, but they become the grounds for loyalty. And the conviction grew during the 18 fifties at the south, and the North really represented two distinct civilizations.

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And on both sides there was there was this kind of picture of things, and some 600,000 Americans died as a result of that speaking of the South as a distinct civilization. If it was that perhaps Housley's theory would support the uniqueness of the Southern culture in that the yeoman farmer whom he found to be the majority force in antebellum life in the South formed a kind of Jeffersonian agrarian foundation to the South.

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And isn't it true that some historians following his lead, have offered the hypothesis that really you had Jeffersonian agrarian image of man, uh, in the face of which the pro slavery position was an aberration? Those, uh, those two images we started out with certainly don't exhaust the whole picture.

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And that's one of the others. And until comparatively recently, it was until the civil rights issue came to the fore. It was still possible to see in the South, kind of the native seat of a of an agrarian liberalism that stems from Thomas Jefferson. And it did happen to be a white Southerner who defined America in the Declaration of Independence there.

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But even that, uh, there there there's an infinity of other kinds of images and myths and pictures that people have of the South, the new South, Uh, certainly after 18 65 or after 18 80. Certainly that became so firmly implanted in the minds of Southerners that I think every Southerner has sort of grown up with that idea that we have got to develop economically.

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And that is the that is the That's the solution to all our problems. It's a an idea that again, it takes the form of myth in the sense of being false to some extent, because the Henry Grady and those original prophets of the New South they wanted to believe it so much that they had convinced themselves that it had already come true.

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And historians often one of the the occupational hazards being a historian is you. Sometimes, yeah, you often have the feeling you've seen it before. It's happened before, and I get some of that sense about all the talk I hear now about the Sun Belt. It's so appealing to two Southerners to feel that the underdog is getting back on top now that they believe all this because they want to in many cases.

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But statistically, this is one myth you can give a kind of statistical test to. It doesn't hold up the There's not a southern state yet that has caught up with the with the national average, uh, income per capita income, with the exception of Texas, which has just barely the most recent figures I've looked at in 1979 and Texas was $15 above the national average.

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Florida is getting close about 97%. Virginia is closest. Uh, my it's 98% but a lot of that is the Pentagon payroll and such, uh, my native state of South Carolina is 80%. We used to have a saying when I was growing up there, and I guess most Southerners know they're saying Thank God for Mississippi because in South Carolina we could always count on Mississippi to be lower in any statistical table there only at about there only about 70% of the national income.

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That's very interesting. So the Sun Belt myth, which is the latest myth about the South, is not borne out by the facts. It's more illusion than fact, or it is. Well, I get, as I've said about the others, that these things don't catch on unless they have their rooted in some way.

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In reality, the Sun Belt myth is rooted in the reality that the gap has been narrowing and we've been over the years since 18 80 narrowing the gap in industry and industrial development and economic development pretty steadily. The it is true if you look at the rates of growth the South.

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In recent years, even Mississippi has been growing at a rate faster than the nation as a whole, economically. But to project the the image of the South as a land flowing with milk and honey is just is just false as yet, we haven't gotten there yet, and I I can't help being reminded of those prophets of the new South in the last century who thought it had already happened then and it hadn't you.

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Next time, maybe we'll make it. I hope so. You have named in the infinite variety of Southern mythology. A number of individual myths, some of whom I suppose, you would say, have passed their time. The pro slavery South, the Confederate South, the demagogic South, the state's rights south, the fighting South, the Lazy South, the folklore south, the south of jazz and blues.

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But here's one the rapacious south running away with northern industries. Well, how about that one. Well, that's part of the Sun Belt myth. I think part of the picture that many Northerners now have persuaded themselves that this is all true. And to some extent, perhaps it is, though a lot of that development has been, has been native development of new things, and even in past years, with the textile industry, a lot of that development was growth, with Southern Capital and Southern Management as a as you had a decline in that industry going on in New England.

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Of course, what that reflects is the textiles 10 In every industrial revolution, from the first one in England, textiles have been sort of the harbinger of the industrial revolution, and they tend to migrate to where there's cheap labor. And unhappily, that's been a great magnet in the South for for industries.

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I think in the modern economy it's less and less of a magnet for the kind of new high technology industries that we're getting now. But it's that still is not is not out of the picture. Very few of the major textile mills in the south, including what is now your home state of North Carolina, have been unionized J.

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P. Stevens, I suppose, is the most notable example of a mill that was unionized and was the subject of the motion picture Norma Rae. But the rest seem not to have been unionized, and the salary schedule remains low by comparison. Remains textile workers elsewhere, including Lina, is one of the one of the lowest.

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There are many things that have been advanced to explain that part of it is elements that are hostile to unions have found successful means of fighting them off. A large part of it, however, is that in years past there has always been that backlog of people in a depressed agriculture who are looking for jobs.

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And it's, uh, it's been true, unhappily in in many cases that particularly for a state like Mississippi back in the 19 thirties, when they started their they're big program of industrialization that really even sweatshops would be a step up for a lot of people who were stranded in those in those backwaters.

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And even with the rapid development we've had recently, there are a lot of such areas, the those counties which have been bypassed by this economic development, I'd like to ask in that connection. Is the south still a distinctive region of the United States? Is there still such a thing as a distinctively Southern civilization or culture?

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Or has the South been submerged in the general homogenizing process of American culture? That's, uh, that's a good, uh, a good subject. And one of the one of the minor industries of the South is holding symposiums to discuss whether or not that whether or not that's true and maybe one of the major industries of the South.

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As a matter of fact, I am. Of course, I I have a bias because I'm a professional Southerner in the in the literal sense that I that's my special field of study. And so I'm inclined, I guess, to look for the the signs that it is.

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It is surviving, I think the there's a rather hasty assumption that change necessarily means that everybody becomes all alike. Well, we've talked about these various images and myths of the South, and they have some basis in reality, and over a period of 400 years, we've seen a lot of change in the South.

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You don't find many Tidewater aristocrats anymore, but the the image in in recent years has been more the, well, the Billy Carter, a good old boy redneck sort of image. It keeps changing and the grounds of the distinctiveness and the culture keeps changing. But I'm a colleague of mine in the sociology department at Chapel Hill, John Reed has a few years ago brought out a book on the enduring South.

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Instead of looking at the statistics of sort of things you can count. What he did was to check out the statistics that turned up in public opinion surveys, and he found that there was in many ways there's in the in the outlook of the people. There's more difference north and South than than there is black and white in their mental outlooks.

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This is based, however, largely on more on surveys of white opinion and black. So you couldn't speak with too much confidence about black. It was Charles L. Black Junior. You pointed out in one of your writings who had the fantastic dream, as you expressed it, that Southern whites and blacks, bound in a special bond of common tragedy, may come to recognize their kinship.

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Kinship? Well, I think there's there are a lot of things that are common in the in the culture you've you hear frequently either blacks or whites commenting on traveling somewhere, and they hear somebody talking behind them. And they look around thinking it's some black brother or white brother, as the case may be and find it's the other the we learned a few years ago about soul food, and that's just standard Southern cuisine that we all grew up with.

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And in many, many ways, I think the world cash years ago said, uh black man entered into white man just as white man entered into a black man. In the culture, there was so much interchange and so many things that are common in the folklore and the speech patterns and so on that there is a real kinship there.

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About a century ago, President Rutherford B. Hayes, at the close of the reconstruction period, strictly speaking, proposed a Southern policy for the Southern states. About a century later, Richard Nixon proposed a Southern strategy, and the Republican Party looked at the South as a field to be tilled.

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And indeed, Kevin Phillips, uh, Nixon aide, wrote a book entitled The Emerging Republican Majority in which he said that the true American majority would be Republican and would find its center in the South and in the Heartland of the country, the mid the the Midwest and the Rockies.

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Um, in your writings, you have put that thesis down in the past. I wonder if, in the wake of the Reagan victory, you would still put it down with the same vigor? Uh, I don't guess. Many people think of JP Morgan as a, uh, political pundit, but he did say something once.

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It would be a proposal here. I think somebody asking, What is this? What is the market going to do? And his answer was, It will fluctuate. Uh, I think that's what American politics are going to do. They have done it certainly in the past. And if you look back, there have been in recent years a number of elections that, in one way or another, have been kind of flukes.

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1964 after Lyndon Johnson's victory over Barry Goldwater, the papers were full of stuff about the talk about the disappearance of the Republican Party and then in 68 well, it was. It was 69 the year after Nixon's victory that Kevin Phillips came out with that emerging Republican majority.

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And I had written this piece in which you say I put down that idea Well, you call it a nine day wonder. And then then came the 72 election. But then, in 1976 that was turned around, uh, once again, somewhat narrower margin, of course. So I think we have to wait and see how these Reagan programs pan out before we can.

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There is an idea among a lot of the so called new political historians and political scientists that we have at intervals in our history critical elections, pivotal elections in which things turn around in such a way that they're never the same again. And you have a A period.

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And this does work out down to a point in American history, almost like numerology every 32 or 36 years, uh, one, uh, some other party will become the dominant party for about that period of time, and then it turns around again. In recent years, though, there hasn't been one of these critical elections.

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It seems to me now, maybe we just had one, and we don't recognize it yet. Maybe we are yet to have it. The real test, I guess, would have been if both houses of Congress had gone Republican in a a large, an enormous turnout votes. But I don't believe that recent election quite quite fits that pattern.

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Maybe this theory of the critical election is has had its day and it doesn't work out anymore. But I think it would be a There have been so many things. Of course, I don't know that there's ever any times are ever normal that has ever been a normal presidential election.

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But in recent years it seems the Korean War and everything that turned on that the the Iranian crisis here the past year. You could even make an argument. I wouldn't I wouldn't go try to defend it very far that the last election would have had a different outcome.

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Uh, but for one helicopter, uh, you know that that could have made some difference, Uh, in in in people's view of things. Yes, a very telling part. Uh, though there may have been an even bigger disaster than there was, Who knows? Yes. It could have gone that way as well Well, this has been a fascinating conversation for me, and I know we could go on.

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I would have liked to ask, and I'll like you. I'll ask after we're off the air, a number of other questions, and perhaps we'll have the opportunity to have you back again. I thank you very much for being with me. Dr. George Tindall Keenan, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is a guest lecturer in the University of Florida this week.

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Thank you, Doctor Tender for being with me on conversation. Thanks very much.