(I'm having problems parsing your last post.)
That PDF I posted made lots of good points about views of "honor" and the "need to take revenge". And where those attitudes came from. And how they found fertile soil in the American South (and West).
The KKK was big in Indiana and elsewhere that wasn't in the South. It's hard to argue, though, that the KKK isn't intimately tied up with "Southern Culture". E.g.:
Woodrow Wilson did a lot to segregate the Federal Government even though he was President of Princeton University and Governor of New Jersey (though he was born in Virginia - how about that).
So those aspects of "Southern Culture" can be found anywhere in the US (and elsewhere). But it's the South that still celebrates people like Robert E. Lee and their treasonous "honor" and so forth - not the North.
So, again, racism and all sort of vile characteristics of Americans can be found anywhere. And good people can be found in the South and anywhere. But lots of pathologies of "Southern Culture" can be found anywhere, too.
I think I'm about done. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
That PDF I posted made lots of good points about views of "honor" and the "need to take revenge". And where those attitudes came from. And how they found fertile soil in the American South (and West).
The KKK was big in Indiana and elsewhere that wasn't in the South. It's hard to argue, though, that the KKK isn't intimately tied up with "Southern Culture". E.g.:
Perhaps the first such pro-Klan literary work was James D. Lynch’s epic poem Redpath, or, the Ku Klux Tribunal (1877). Lynch was a Mississippi lawyer who had become a prominent and vocal opponent of Reconstruction, and as Democrats retook the South he turned his attention to literary efforts, first in the epic poem Robert E. Lee, or, Heroes of the South (1876) and then in Redpath. What is most striking about Redpath is its titular hero, a northern political aide who travels to the South on a fact-finding mission for a prosecution of the KKK and who converts to the cause when he learns instead of what the poem insists are the organization’s necessary and heroic activities. To aid in similar national conversions, Lynch went on to write a prominent anti-Reconstruction, pro-KKK history of his home state, Kemper County Vindicated, and a Peep at Radical Rule in Mississippi (1879). And by the early 1890s, the nation had indeed seemingly converted, as illustrated by the choice of Lynch to compose the official welcoming poem for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
In the same decade, Thomas W. Dixon Jr., himself a North Carolina lawyer as well as an ordained Baptist minister and the son and nephew of prominent former KKK leaders, developed a plan to create his own literary depictions of the Klan and the Reconstruction South. Inspired in part, he later claimed, by the “misrepresentations” of southerners in a dramatic production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Dixon wrote The Leopard’s Spots (1902), the first in a trilogy of historical novels about Reconstruction that would also include The Clansman (1905) and The Traitor (1907). The novels became national bestsellers. Dixon became a celebrity, starring on stage in a dramatic production of his book The Sins of the Father: A Romance of the South (1910-1911) and writing the screenplay for one of the first blockbuster motion pictures, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915).
Woodrow Wilson did a lot to segregate the Federal Government even though he was President of Princeton University and Governor of New Jersey (though he was born in Virginia - how about that).
So those aspects of "Southern Culture" can be found anywhere in the US (and elsewhere). But it's the South that still celebrates people like Robert E. Lee and their treasonous "honor" and so forth - not the North.
So, again, racism and all sort of vile characteristics of Americans can be found anywhere. And good people can be found in the South and anywhere. But lots of pathologies of "Southern Culture" can be found anywhere, too.
I think I'm about done. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.