A Southern Nation of Speechifiers: Heyrman and Eastman in Conversation

University of Chicago Press

Christine Leigh Heyrman’s Southern Cross makes a wonderful companion piece to Carolyn Eastman’s A Nation of Speechifiers. More precisely, Heyrman preemptively corrects a historical oversight in Eastman’s much more recent work. Both authors are concerned with identifying the relationships of nonelites to structures of power in the early national period. Both argue that the changes which took place after the turn of the century were not the rosy picture of democratization which has been the academic orthodoxy for politics, society, and religion for some time. Both excellently demonstrate their cases. Yet, while Heyrman treats her subject comprehensively within her limits, Eastman claims a broader scope than she is ultimately able to encompass.

In Nation of Speechifiers, Eastman argues that far from a great triumph of democratization that once dominated thinking on Jacksonian politics or even the perpetual repression of nonelites that has dominated some feminist and minority histories, the period immediately after the Revolution was one of profound cultural negotiation in which nonelites were able to seize access to public participation in limited but meaningful ways. She looks at politics, education, voluntary associations, trade organizations, publishing, and professional oratory to see the ways that women, children, and racial minorities had a public voice prior to 1810. After that, however, culture shifted as the nation solidified. A war won, a peaceful party transition, and a new vision of suffrage for white men all functioned to close the previously permeable borders of public participation and exclude nonelites.

Yet Eastman glaringly omits religion as an arena in which women, children, and racial minorities had a public voice, a curious oversight particularly in view of Eastman’s stress on oratory as a means of public power. The omission might have made a good avenue for further research had not Heyrman perfectly tackled the question more than a decade earlier. Heyrman takes the same period Eastman considers, treats the same nonelites that Eastman does, but focuses narrowly on religion in the South. The conclusions she draws are largely the same. A newly formed (at least in the South) evangelicalism is initially open to the public voice and at least informal authority of women, children, and racial minorities. After the turn of the century, however, Heyrman exhaustively and convincingly traces the restriction of power into the hands of older white males. She concludes, much as Eastman does, by attacking facile notions of democratization by asking the question democratization for whom.

Eastman’s omission of religion—and of the South and transmontane America almost in their entirety—clearly could have been corrected by reading Heyrman, and the failure to do so borders on inexcusable. Yet readers of Heyrman can benefit from consulting Eastman as well. Heyrman explains the changes in evangelicalism largely as evangelistic necessities. “To put the matter bluntly, evangelicals could not rest content with a religion that was the faith of women, children, and slaves” (193). Growth required appeasing and then appealing to white men, in whose hands all temporal power rested. Eastman suggests there is something more at work in the culture at large here. Eastman’s exclusion of the South from her study may throw this observation into doubt for the arena of Heryman’s work, but nevertheless the question must be raised whether or not evangelistic necessity adequately explains the need for a more male-oriented, “traditional” religious structure. Even if it does, do the broader cultural changes charted by Eastman explain what is driving this evangelistic need? In Heyrman, essentially, evangelicals hit a glass ceiling above which a movement of women could no longer ascend. The early nineteenth century as the period of transition is incidental; it is just when the need for change outweighed the inertia of convention. Eastman’s work suggests there is something more happening in the period.

Both books are supremely readable, and Heyrman in particular has a literary flourish rarely seen among historians. Though my interests and preferences tend toward Heyrman's work, I confidently recommend either for general reading. Eastman's more theoretical framework may scare off non-academics, but anyone who has even a hobbyists interest in the period will be more than amply rewarded by putting in the effort to understand her argument. Together, these two works give a picture of early national American democracy that will challenge the narrative taught in most colleges not to long ago and still, consequently, taught in most grade schools.

Goodbye, Gene Genovese

I realize that I am late commenting on this, but the unfortunate truth of our culture is that we do not announce the deaths of great thinkers with quite the same vigor as the deaths of mediocre musicians. I met the news of Eugene Genovese's death--a few nights ago when I finally heard it--first with disbelief and then with a profound, perhaps misplaced, sense of loss. I came to Genovese somewhat late in my academic career, after making the unlikely shift from Byzantine intellectual traditions to Southern ones, from oriental mysticism to Baconian rationalism. Genovese became something of an inspiration to me, both because of the monumental shift in focus that he represented in his academic life (from Marxist to conservative, the mind of the slave to the mind of the master) but also simply as a native northerner who developed a profound fascination for southern history. My comparatively recent turn to southern history means that I have only just scratched the surface of Genovese's contributions to the field, but Consuming Fire and The Southern Tradition proved easily the two most influential works in cementing my love for the South as an object of study. Genovese will be missed. He was the sort of scholar who might very well have gone on producing monumental new works indefinitely if life allowed it. It is my good fortune to be left with so many volumes of his thought still unread so that I might continue to have new experiences of him for years to come.

In tribute, let me leave you with these thoughts by Genovese, a voice from beyond critiquing the blindness of that overwhelming majority on the Right who proudly claim conservatism in ignorance of its most basic features:

Southern conservatism has always traced the evils of the modern world to the ascendency of the profit motive and material acquisitiveness; to the conversion of small property based on individual labor into accumulated capital manifested as financial assets; to the centralization and bureaucraticization of management; to the extreme specialization of labor and the rise of consumerism; to an idolatrous cult of economic growth and scientific and technological progress; and to the destructive exploitation of nature. Thus, down to our day, southern conservatives have opposed finance capitalism and have regarded socialism as the logical outcome of the capitalist centralization of economic and state power...

What goes largely unnoticed is that, on much of the American Right, the conservative critique of modernity has largely given way to a free-market liberalism the ideal of which shares much with the radical Left’s version of egalitarianism. The traditionalists are entitled to gloat, for they have always regarded socialism and radical democracy as the logical outcome of bourgeois liberalism. The free-market Right professes to believe in a level paying field and an attendant doctrine of equality of opportunity, despite all evidence that neither could ever be realized. The projected hopes are no less an invitation to disillusionment and despair than their counterpart in the Left’s chimera of equality of outcome and ultimate condition. And they are just as cruel. The left-wing version of egalitarianism generates the politics of envy and the degrading psychology of victimization. Those who cannot match the performance of others blame sexism, racism, and other forms of social oppression for their personal failures and shortcomings. Their frustration, anger, and irrationality produce effects all the worse since there is often a measure of truth in the complaints.

Love Song for the South

I am not a Southerner by birth. In fact, I was an adult before I ever moved to the South for the first time. In view of those facts, my sudden and temporary exodus from the South should seem like a small affair, hardly worth mentioning (especially in this venue where I try to avoid autobiography as much as possible). Nevertheless, eight years living in the best and worst of Arkansas and Tennessee has thoroughly acculturated me.

I have been in the barren landscape of the American Southwest for only just over a week, and the culture shock, such as it is, has yet to wear off. I am not yet accustomed to the cool dry mornings and the hot dry afternoons. I still get confused momentarily at every sign where Spanish is the primary language, and English the translation. The Spanish Renaissance architecture, the dust storms, the cloudless skies, the brown landscape, the flat horizon. None of it even remotely recalls my adopted home in East Tennessee with the Smoky Mountains rising to greet me every morning.


The greatest difference is not, however, a matter of climate, scenery, or language. It is one of culture. The stereotype of the South moving at a slower pace, expressing herself in a more polite idiom, embracing notions of honor and classic

masculinity, of belles and beaus and agrarian simplicity are, James C. Cobb rightly notes in his history of southern identity, mythic constructions. Cobb does not, however, give quite enough attention to just how closely myth can conform itself to reality. The peculiar culture of the South, her sectional identity—nascent, perhaps, before the Civil War, but consciously constructed after that—can only be dismissed entirely by those academics (especially those educated Northern elites, curse us) who have only studied her but not lived in her.

There are numerous ways to attempt to quantify the cultural solidarity of the South against those who believe it is exaggerated or constructed out of misinformed nostalgia. The political solidarity is an obvious place to start, both as Democrats in the nineteenth century and beyond and then as Republicans in more recent history. Another obvious signifier is the historical predominance of democratic forms of religion in the South: the Methodists, Baptists, and Disciples. In either case, it would be simple to look at distinguishing political or religious features and reverse engineer from these telling facts about the South’s distinctive culture.

But southerners and sojourners alike do not experience those distinctive in this way. Instead, let me relay an anecdote or two that has been characteristic of my experience. After having lived in Arkansas for four years, I took a trip to the Midwest. While passing through Indiana, I stopped for a quick meal with a friend who lived nearby. The lunch was wonderful, but I couldn’t help but notice throughout how brusquely my friend addressed herself to the waitress. The waitress, in kind, seemed to respond to her just as abruptly. There was no overt hostility, but there were also a dearth of “please” and “thank you,” of smiles or friendly chatter. There certainly was nothing conversation about the tone. When lunch was over, I asked my friend if the waitress had done something to upset her, and she was confused. The waitress had been great as far as she was concerned. She left her a big tip. That was, in her Midwestern mind, a perfectly pleasant transaction. A similar lunch would probably have prompted distress for a southerner, as it did for me.

Some time later, after I had moved to Tennessee, I had occasion to attend a seminar in New York. I pride myself on my punctuality, and so I was surprised to find that when I arrived for the orientation precisely at seven o’clock when it was scheduled, I had already missed the first fifteen minutes and was left with nowhere to sit. Analogous seminars in Memphis invariable started fifteen minutes late. From New York, I took my wife into New England to visit my childhood home. We stopped at a snack shop along the way in the relatively early morning. We stood a way back from the menu, surveying it. There was no rush. The place was empty, and we had the whole day to explore the area. Nevertheless, we both got the distinct impression that we were being rushed.

There are countless positive antitheses to these as well. The police officer and the mechanic who replaced a torn belt on the side of the road in rural Arkansas asking nothing more in payment than a post card whenever we got where we were going. Walking into the barber after a bargain cutter performed a hack job on my hair and receiving the undivided care of the entire staff. Standing at the counter of a general store in North Carolina, holding up a line of tourists while I talked to the girl behind the counter about her morning sickness from her last pregnancy. Getting to know intimately the staff of a small town visitor center as we took hours to seek out the perfect place to eat. Sitting down with a stranger outside a store on main street and talking about nothing while our wives shopped.

On my last fateful trip out of the South, if you’ll pardon the melodrama, my wife and I stopped at a diner in Arkansas. A man in the parking lot noticed our Tennessee tags. He asked if the county on the license plate was near Sevier County. When we told him it was, he stopped and talked to us about his love of the Smokies, about his wife who had died some years ago, and about how he had scattered some of her ashes in the mountains. We offered our condolences. When I told him where I was moving, he offered me his condolences. Best wishes, God blesses, and good to me yous were all obligatorily exchanged, and my wife and I, delayed but not bothered, ate our breakfast.

That last incident sums up for me my brief but transformative experience in the South. Taken individually, my experiences elsewhere or my experiences in the South may be written off as so many unrelated incidents, not indicative of anything. Taken together, however, they manifest the character of a culture. Others from other parts of the nation will have had some or all of those experiences in their native regions, but I am convinced that they represent the soul of the South. Changed and changing, she nevertheless retains that distinctive pace, that polite, if only superficially so, idiom, that conservatism which is not limited to politics, that masculinity which is simple but virile, that femininity which is backward and self-contradictory but alluring, and that community where people are not strangers by default who become friends in time but friends automatically who may by circumstance be estranged.

There is, of course, a note of doxology in the above. It certainly isn’t my intention to place the South up as a paragon against which all other sectional American cultures are to be measured. Those peculiar features of southern culture have led to a number of the most shameful abuses in American history, though no more so than the ethos of the North. (Incidentally, as the historiography of the Northeast—which dominates the national conversation—continues to glory in the shame of race slavery in the South, it is curiously unconcerned with the analogous indignities which resulted from its competing system of wage slavery which, in some respects, continues even into the present.) Instead, I intend only to affirm the reality of those sectional differences and to express, on a personal level, my preference for the South, especially as I now find myself estranged from them.

Genovese on the Difference Between North and South

Here are an interesting pair of quotes from Eugene Genovese on the historic and enduring differences between the culture of the American North and the American South. They probably each warrant entries of their own with attendant commentary, but--as is the case with other great thinkers, like David Bentley Hart--I find that Genovese's thought is often more compelling when allowed to simply speak in an annotative void:

There nonetheless remains a fundamental difference between northern and southern versions of religious tolerance. In the North people are wont to say, “You worship God in your way, and we’ll worship him in ours.” This delightful formulation says, in effect, that since religion is of little consequence anyway, why argue? In contrast, the southern version, well expressed in an old joke, says: “You worship God in your way, and we’ll worship him in His.” From the early days of the Republic, when the Baptists led the fight for religious freedom and the separation of church and state, white southerners have done rather well in living together with mutual respect and tolerance for each other’s religious views. Always reminding themselves of human frailty, they are perfectly tolerant of some damned fool’s right to choose eternal damnation. But they are not about to pretend that they regard another’s religion as intrinsically equal to their own.

“Prejudice,” like “discrimination” and “tradition,” is a positive word in the southern lexicon, much as it is a dirty word in the liberal lexicon that prevails in academia…It rests upon a belief in an omnipotent God who necessarily can only be approached through a faith that requires community-grounded prejudices and apparently nonscientific modes of discrimination. This viewpoint warns against the unforeseen and often destructive results of social experiments that derive from an appeal to abstract reason—in effect, to ideological constructs. We might recall, for example, that “reason” in the guise of the most advanced scientific thought contributed to the pernicious triumph of racist thought in the nineteenth century. The religiously orthodox Old South, in contradistinction to the religiously liberal Northeast, stood on its prejudice in favor of a literal reading of the Bible’s account of the monogenesis of the human race and rejected scientific racism. Generally, this view of prejudice says that a community’s historically developed sense of right and wrong should be permitted to defy the latest fashions in reasoned speculation until they are empirically established.

Imperialism in the Imperialized South

Historian Joel Williamson wrote of William Faulkner that he had been "born into and reared among an imperialized people...IN writing about their plight, he met the plight of the imperialized people of the world, the people whose land had been raped and labor taken to supply raw materials for the factories of the industrial powers." It is a too often forgotten, ignored, or suppressed truth of American history that the South is in fact a territory of the imperialistic North. That sounds reactionary, superficial, and tribalist. I'm aware. Nevertheless, on purely empirical grounds, it is difficult to contest that the Civil War--without commenting on the justness of its motivations or outcomes--was the exaltation of national interest over regional autonomy such that a territory and its population were nationalized by force of arms rather than consent from the governed. That is the essence of imperialism, and its effects have been felt in the South for more than a century and a half. It was the context that produced Faulkner and it is the silent force that is at work in shaping southern identity still.

Consider Eugene Genovese's account of the intellectual imperialism which dominates the history of the South as a discipline:

The northern victory in 1865 silenced a discretely southern interpretation of American history and national identity, and it promoted a contemptuous dismissal of all things southern as nasty, racist, immoral, and intellectually inferior. The northern victory did carry out a much too belated abolition of slavery. But it also sanctified northern institutions and intentions, which included the unfettered expansion of a bourgeois world view and the suppression of alternate visions of social order. In consequence, from that day to this, the southern conservative critique of modern gnosticism has been wrongly equated with racism and white supremacy...

The history of the Old South is now often taught at leading universities, when it is taught at all, as a prolonged guilt-trip, not to say a prologue to the history of Nazi Germany...To speak positively about any part of this southern tradition is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity - an increasingly successful campaign by the media and an academic elite to strip young white southerners and arguably black southerners as well, of their heritage, and, therefore, their identity. They are being taught to forget their forebears or to remember them with shame...It is one thing to silence people, another to convince them. And to silence them on matters central to their self-respect and dignity is to play a dangerous game - to build up in them harsh resentments that, sooner or later, are likely to explode and bring out their worst.

Genovese's picture is convicting primarily because it speaks so directly to the experience of all Americans who have, at some point, sat through a variety of academic courses and participated in a public discourse which sees the South as the ideological punching bag of the dominant cultural and intellectual forces. But my interest here is not to bemoan the ongoing cultural, intellectual, and economic marginalization of the South. It is, instead, to draw attention to the hypocrisy which the realization that southerners are an imperalized people brings to light. In spite of more than a century of being told that its systems of power, its culture, its values, and its economic models are inferior and even evil (and in some cases they assuredly were), it is now the South which has taken up the baton and is leading the charge for ever greater pursuits of American imperialism overseas.

Certainly, America is no longer acquiring new territory by force as it did a century ago at the height of the Age of Imperialism, but our imperialism is nevertheless as vigorous as ever. It is now commonplace to justify our foreign wars (and various other interventionist efforts) as attempts to spread freedom, democracy, and capitalism. Freedom, of course, is understood only in terms of American individualistic libertinism, and alternate theories of freedom are not considered. Democracy, even as it throws countries into fits of political turmoil, war, and mob violence, is never questioned as a universal imperative. After all, it works here--except that it seems that everyone agrees it isn't working at the moment. There is no need to even consider how often a jingoistic devotion to capitalism has brought the world to the brink of annihilation in the past seventy years. During recent decades and in contemporary discourse particularly, it has been the Republican Party with its primary base in the South which has promoted this brand of cultural and economic imperialism.

So be it, if that's what Americans want. After all, the essence of almost every great civilization in history is the ability to devise a culture, economy, and government that is easily and profitably exported by coercion for the benefit of the originating state. The problem with that model is that the South is not the origin of these ideas. It is within living memory that the last Civil War veteran died. Southerners remember that war, right? That is the one that was fought because Southerners rejected New England concepts of the scope and nature of freedom, the balance in republican democracy between central and regional interests, and the virtue of "Mammonism." The ideas that Southerners are now attempt to violently export these values internationally after having them violently overwhelm their own culture would be comical if it weren't so unsettling. The deepest irony comes when we realized that--just as once Southerners opposed government involvement in marriage laws--the original anti-imperialists were Bourbon Democrats, the Redeemers who had saved the South from Northern domination during Reconstruction. How quickly we forget.

If only the South would stop to remember what it felt like and what it continues to feel like to be forcibly conformed to foreign modes of thinking, southerners would be more reluctant to make American imperialism an ideological pillar in the new architecture of southern thought.