Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920-1944

By John T. Kneebone

Before the Civil Rights movement, southern liberal journalists played a crucial role in shaping southern thought on race and racism. John Kneebone presents a richly detailed intellectual history of southern racial liberalism between World War I and World War II by examining the works of five leading southern journalists -- Gerald W. Johnson, Baltimore Evening Sun; George Fort Milton, Chattanooga News; Virginius Dabney, Richmond Times-Dispatch; Hodding Carter, Greenville (Miss.) Delta Democrat-Times; and Ralph McGill, Atlanta Constitution.

The South's leading liberal journalists came from varied backgrounds and lived in different regions of the South, but all had one characteristic in common: as public advocates of southern liberalism, each spoke as a southerner with deep roots in the southern past. Yet their editorials were not intended solely for local audiences; they wrote essays for national and regional journals of opinion as well, and each of these men published important books on the South and its history. Through their writings, they gained reputations throughout the country as articulate spokesmen for southern liberalism.

Their essays, editorials, books, and letters provide rich and abundant sources for studying the changing patterns of southern liberal thought in the critical years from the 1920s to the 1940s. Moreover, these journalists were members of southern liberal organizations -- Will W. Alexander's Commission on Interracial Cooperation, the Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching, the Southern Policy Committee, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and the Southern Regional Council -- and so they helped devise the reform programs that they in turn publicized.

While they believed that social and economic change in the modern South required reform of race relations, the journalists felt that these reforms could be accommodated within the framework of racial segregation. The protests of blacks against segregation during World War II challenged that way of thinking and created a crisis for southern liberals. Kneebone analyzes this crisis and the disconnection between the southern liberalism of the 1920s and 1930s and the Civil Rights movement.

Originally published in 1985.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781469644103

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Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920–1944

Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies

Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920-1944

John T. Kneebone

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill & London

© 1985 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Kneebone, John T.

Southern liberal journalists and the issue of race, 1920-1944.

(Fred W. Morrison series in Southern studies)

Bibliography: p. Includes index.

1. Race relations and the press—Southern States—

History—20th century. 2. Southern States—Race

relations. 3. Liberalism—Southern States—History—

20th century. I. Title. II. Series.

PN4893.K58    1985        302.2’322’0975        85-1104

ISBN 0-8078-6555-9

For my parents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1Coming of Age in the Progressive South

2Illuminating the Benighted South

3Al Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and the Solid South

4About Face or Forward March?

5Tilting the Color Line

6Dead Laws and Live Demagogues

7Roosevelt and Rational Democracy

8Southern Policy for the Southern Regions

9The New Deal Is Dealt

10Adolf Hitler and the American Way

11The Conservative Course in Race Relations

Epilogue: Because Injustice Is Here

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

The writing of history depends upon assistance from a community of scholars, librarians, and institutions, offered in a spirit of cooperation that makes acknowledgment always necessary and always inadequate. My greatest debt is to those southern liberals and scholars of southern history whose published works blazed the trail I have traveled here. Many other persons aided in this study, and it is impossible to express my gratitude to all of them here. Friends listened patiently while I talked through my ideas, colleagues offered observations that gave me food for further thought, and those who knew the journalists, southern liberalism, and the South generously contributed their special perspectives and judgments. I am especially grateful to Virginius Dabney for permission to examine his papers at the University of Virginia and for enduring a formal interview.

My research required me to press request after request upon the Interlibrary Loan librarians at the University of Virginia and Princeton University. Their unfailing cheerfulness and efficiency eased my conscience and speeded the work along. Archivists at the University of Virginia, the Library of Congress, the Alabama State Archives, Princeton University, and the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina recommended relevant manuscript collections and created a stimulating environment for scholarship. I was able to travel to North Carolina with the help of Douglas Greenberg and a grant from the Princeton University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Without the time for writing provided by a Mellon Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities at Harvard University and a Bankhead Fellowship at the University of Alabama, completion of this work would have been much more difficult, if not impossible.

I first learned of the tormented historiography on the Civil War and Reconstruction from John V. Mering at the University of Arizona, whose rigorous standards for scholarship I am still trying to meet. At the University of Virginia, Paul M. Gaston introduced me to southern history and then directed my dissertation with wise suggestions, searching criticism, and the inspiration of his example. Edward L. Ayers’s skillful reading contributed importantly to the final revisions of that dissertation. Barry Rutizer, Daniel H. Borus, and William A. Link criticized early drafts, and Armstead Robinson and Kenneth W. Thompson did the same for the final version. As I revised the dissertation, several friends and colleagues read all or parts of the manuscript. I am especially grateful for the comments and the encouragement of Michael Bernstein, Richard Challener, Jeff Norrell, Nancy J. Weiss, and George Wright. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers for the University of North Carolina Press for their valuable criticisms and suggestions for improvements. Above all, with her intelligence, hard work, and love, Suzanne Hill Freeman made me a better person and this a better book. I am indebted to all but remain solely responsible for any inadequacies in this work.

Introduction

In 1952, two years before the Supreme Court ruled racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, Will W. Alexander recounted for interviewers from Columbia University’s Oral History Project his career as a southern liberal reformer. Between the two world wars, Alexander had served as executive director of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, the most influential southern liberal organization for the improvement of race relations. Early in his work with the CIC, Alexander explained, he discovered that almost all southern newspapers were sensitive to the dangers of racial conflict and welcomed the CIC’s efforts to publicize improvements and decrease public tensions. A much smaller number of southern journalists proved especially aware of the necessity for reform, becoming themselves active participants in the CIC and other southern liberal organizations. Through their writings, they gained reputations within and without the South as articulate spokesmen for southern liberalism. I should say, Alexander declared, that the best newspapermen in the South have for the last thirty years been the most constructive single influence in changing racial patterns.¹

By the time of Alexander’s interview, southern liberal journalists realized that black Americans intended to dismantle the South’s system of racial segregation—but ironically, these spokesmen for a better South responded with caution and equivocation. Rather than coming as a fulfillment of their work, the assault on segregation seemed to expose the ambiguities of their commitment to racial justice and to make their doctrines seem increasingly anachronistic.

This book is about those journalists and the changing patterns of their thinking on race, reform, and history through the decades preceding the Civil Rights protest movement. As Alexander’s comments suggest, newspapermen, rather than newspapers, should be the focus of attention. The urban press in the South recognized the danger that sensationalized reporting on race relations could lead to public violence or rioting. In 1925, the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association included in its formal code of ethics the newspaper’s obligation to show respect and tolerance for those of different religions, races, and circumstances of life. Responsible journalism, however, meant that southern blacks—and race relations—tended to become even more invisible in the white press. To find regular discussions of racial issues in southern newspapers, one had to turn to the editorial pages and to the commentary of individual journalists.²

The journalists studied here publicized southern liberalism to the South and the nation. Rather than merely serving as conduits for the CIC’s press service, they joined southern liberal organizations and took an active part in policy debates. They thus helped to define the southern liberalism that they publicized. Indeed, because of their strategic position as journalists—between reformers and the public, between southern intellectuals and a mass audience—they also served as censors of southern liberalism, declaring by their editorial judgments which ideas and programs for social change deserved commendation and which deserved condemnation. The public course of southern liberalism before the Civil Rights movement may be traced through their editorials and essays.

Most important for the historian, these journalists, by the nature of their profession, produced an extensive public record of analysis and commentary. Daily journalism required them to respond immediately, and in print, to current events and issues, exposing the interconnection between ideas and experience in their thinking on race, reform, and history. Because they often discussed the same topics, moreover, it has been possible to treat them as a group, seeking the common ground upon which they stood as southern liberals.

Contemporary sources identify a fair number of newspapermen at various times as southern liberals, but certain names—Julian LaRose Harris, Grover C. Hall, Louis I. Jaffé, W. J. Cash, Mark Ethridge, John Temple Graves, Jonathan Daniels, Gerald W. Johnson, George Fort Milton, Virginius Dabney, Hodding Carter, and Ralph McGill— appear most often. The requirements of historical analysis narrowed this field further: to determine what southern liberals said to the South—and to measure the limits of permissible public discussion of race and reform—required concentration on journalists who expressed regular editorial opinion on these subjects. To ascertain whether southern liberalism’s message to the South differed from that presented to nonsouthern audiences, I selected those local commentators who also wrote for national journals of opinion. Finally, I chose those among these journalists who supplemented their journalism with the study of history. Interpretations of the region’s past provide justifications for southern liberal reform programs and serve as a sensitive test of changing racial attitudes.

This book, therefore, is based primarily on the writings of five leading southern liberal journalists. The oldest of them, Gerald W. Johnson (1890-1980), helped Howard W. Odum make the University of North Carolina a center for southern liberal scholarship before becoming a columnist for the Baltimore Evening Sun. He stood out in the 1920s as a leading southern liberal critic and continued to address southern issues through his long career. George Fort Milton (1894-1955), of the Chattanooga News, chaired the Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching, played a leading role in the Southern Policy Committee, and, like Johnson, won a national reputation as a historian and biographer. Virginius Dabney (1901–), of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, became the historian of Liberalism in the South, joined Milton on the Southern Policy Committee, and helped to found the Southern Regional Council in 1944. The final two subjects of this study—Ralph McGill (1899-1969), of the Atlanta Constitution, and Hodding Carter (1907-1972), of the Greenville (Miss.) Delta Democrat-Times—became best known after World War II as southern spokesmen for racial justice. Thus, comparison of their thinking with that of the others affords a further test of the development of southern liberalism in the 1930s and its relationship to the Negro protest against the Jim Crow system in the 1950s and 1960s.

That relationship has proven a troublesome issue for scholars of southern liberalism. Writing in the early 1960s, as Negro protest spread across the South, Wilma Dykeman and James Stokely found the Seeds of Southern Change in the career of Will W. Alexander: although Alexander’s prescription of always doing the next things avoided a clear declaration of goals, they inferred that he, and those southern liberals associated with the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, had looked ahead to the elimination of Jim Crow and worked for reform within the framework of racial segregation as a strategic ploy necessary to escape destructive white racist resistance.³ This thesis may fit the case of Alexander, but since 1962, scholars have rejected its extension to southern liberalism in general. Instead, they tend to follow Gunnar Myrdal’s critical assessment of 1944. Myrdal contended that southern liberals, overly fearful of southern reaction and entangled in regional mythology, lacked the courage and power to free the South from racial injustice. This judgment, of course, questions the chosen means of southern liberals, but not their ends. Although men of good will, they simply did not realize that the task would require militant protest and federal intervention.⁴

Recent histories of southern liberals have restated these themes. Charles Eagles’s study of Jonathan Daniels and Race Relations seems to follow Dykeman and Stokely by describing southern liberals as those persons who looked down the road that the South eventually did follow and tried to lead their region in that direction. Yet, when he turns to Daniels, Eagles perceives an evolutionary progression in his attitudes, which changed gradually from insistence upon permanent segregation to a grudging acceptance of racial equality. Daniels’s evolution not only raises the issue of how far down the road southern liberals did look—an issue that Eagles addresses— but also leaves open the question of whether they thought that road would lead to the Civil Rights movement.⁵ Moreover, the metaphor of evolution downplays the mediation between events and existing explanatory frameworks. In fact, like the other journalists, Daniels made sense of new events and issues through his interpretations of earlier ideas and experiences.

Rather than evolving, southern liberalism actually came apart during World War II, when Negro protest and southern liberal criticism of that protest made racial segregation no longer compatible with liberalism. Because southern liberalism had become a coherent ideology for reform in the South, based upon the lessons of history, the challenges of the 1940s presented the journalists and other southern liberals with an intellectual crisis. An evolutionary narrative framework cannot account adequately for the discontinuity between the southern liberalism of the 1930s and the Civil Rights movement.

In his broad survey of southern liberals and their organizations, Morton Sosna acknowledges the differences between the outlook of the 1930s and the Civil Rights movement. He points out ambivalence over racial change, alarmed reactions to independent black protest, and charges that the reluctance of so many white Southern liberals to abandon separate-but-equal during this period [after World War II] was Southern liberalism’s most conspicuous failure. To explain why some southern liberals, like Virginius Dabney, opposed the Civil Rights movement, while others, like Ralph McGill, came to support it, Sosna then introduces a new factor: evangelical religious faith.⁶ This distinction—between southern liberal religious skeptics and southern liberal believers—only makes more curious the general agreement between the Dabneys and the McGills in the earlier period. What did southern liberals advocate for southern race relations before the Civil Rights movement? Why did that advocacy not flow more smoothly into recognition of the protest movement’s promise for southern liberalism?

These problems in interpretation arise in large part from the definition of southern liberalism solely in terms of racial reform. Throughout my research, I treated southern liberal as a label and sought out various journalists and others because their contemporaries had so identified them. At the same time, the topic of southern liberalism gains its significance from the fact of the Civil Rights protest movement and the consequent transformation of southern race relations. Thus, some attempt to clarify the meaning of southern liberalism is necessary, even though any definition risks freighting the term with a more precise meaning than the words ever actually carried.

Sosna identifies southern liberals as those white southerners who saw that the South’s racial system worked injustices on blacks and who supported efforts to eliminate those injustices. This definition is very broad, as he acknowledges, although it does indicate that southern liberals tended to perceive race, rather than class relations or capitalist development, as the primary source of social inequality, thus distinguishing them from the southern radicals of the same period about whom Anthony R Dunbar has written.⁷

Sosna’s definition also implies that liberal doctrines by their nature set those persons who held them in opposition to existing southern racial practices. Certainly, segregation and disfranchisement—both as arbitrary authority over the politically powerless and as group distinctions restrictive to individuals—violated traditional liberal convictions. It is significant, therefore, that the journalists gained their liberal reputations in the 1920s not as racial reformers but rather as defenders of the intellectual and cultural liberties of white southerners such as themselves against indigenous forces of intolerance. Upholding these general liberal doctrines did create tensions in their thinking when they turned to the discussion of race relations.

To leave the definition there, though, is impossible. The contradictions between liberalism and racism existed, but that only makes the long devotion of southern liberals to cautious programs of reform and their reluctance to challenge the Jim Crow system more difficult to explain. Sosna, of course, turns in the end from liberalism to religious faith as the likely source of anti-segregationist convictions. To be sure, when the journalists lifted moral principle to an honored place in the liberal pantheon as they campaigned for American entry into World War II, they undermined their own arguments for gradualism and compromise in racial reform. Nonetheless, they still held to those arguments.

In the end, definition of southern liberalism must emphasize the adjective. Downplaying the southernness of these people tends to identify them with a national racial liberalism that takes its tradition from a history emphasizing the ideals of Jefferson’s Declaration, the abolitionist movement, the Radical Republicans during Reconstruction, and Negro protest in the twentieth century. Southern liberals, however, shared a different interpretation of that American history. No doubt, as Sosna proposes, few of them would have agreed with Ulrich B. Phillips’s thesis that absolute devotion to white supremacy constituted the central theme of southern history, but even fewer would have claimed the abolitionists or the Radical Republicans as part of their tradition.⁸ Understanding southern liberalism necessarily requires analysis of interpretations of the past and the methods of reform that these justified.

Despite differences in historical experience, the South assuredly was and remains American. Not even the proslavery argument could banish the submerged faith of American liberalism, to use Louis Hartz’s phrase, from southern social and political discourse.⁹ As in the rest of the United States, public devotion to a liberal faith easily coexisted with white supremacy, especially as pseudoscientific racism gave legitimacy to racial inequality. Thus, to treat southern liberalism as a contradiction in terms, or to set southern liberals in opposition to regional traditions, and to seek the sources of southern liberalism outside the South, only tends to mystify the phenomenon while setting a standard that few southern liberals actually met.

The Richmond editor who counseled southerners to follow the leadership of progressive men, with large and liberal views, who draw their inspirations from the present and the future, and not the past, could have been Virginius Dabney, or any of the other journalists, writing in the 1920s or 1930s—but in fact he was writing in 1869, endorsing a New South built upon industrial development and full participation in the nation. It is out of this tradition—the quest for southern progress—that the journalists came. Unlike the earlier publicists who, as Paul M. Gaston explains, first created the New South Creed, then proclaimed their visions realities, and thus bequeathed a blinding myth of innocence and triumph to subsequent generations of southerners, the journalists first took up the burdens of southern liberalism as critics of a South they considered backward and benighted. To use Gaston’s analogy of the New South myth to the fable of the emperor’s new clothes, the journalists perhaps failed to announce the emperor’s nakedness but they did proclaim that his clothes were shabby and ill fitting and ought to be exchanged for more up-to-date fashions. No southerner could completely escape the seductive attractions of the New South myth, but, from the beginning of their careers, the journalists sought southern progress rather than defensively insisting upon its existence.¹⁰

In recent years, scholars have explored southern intellectual history between the two world wars, demonstrating through different interpretative frameworks the vitality of this cultural awakening. By concentrating on individuals, and often on literary manifestations of cultural transition, these scholars have inevitably neglected the effects of contemporary—and temporary—public issues and events on changing ideas. The experience of the journalists, who publicized and participated in the southern intellectual debates while also commenting on current affairs, provides a complement to these studies, grounded on day-to-day experience.¹¹

More important, these scholars have tended to assert the fact of southern social change rather than exploring its relationship to the cultural tensions they discern. Indeed, Daniel Joseph Singal contends that insufficient social change occurred in the South to explain the intellectual awakening and thus he presents his work as a local case study in the western world’s transition from Victorianism to Modernism, distinctive primarily for the swiftness of the transition.¹² One area of social change in the interwar period, however, did carry obvious intellectual implications: race relations. The Great Migration of blacks from the rural South during World War I and afterwards made race a national, not just a southern, issue. Outside the Jim Crow South, blacks organized and began to exert pressure for reform, setting their own independent agenda for progress. During this period also, racism fell from intellectual respectability, and alert white southerners recognized that the Jim Crow system stood without easy ideological justification. The recovery of southern intellectual history no doubt required scholars to avoid reductive emphasis on the centrality of racism in southern history, but changes in race relations and in the idea of race during the 1920s and 1930s did create tensions for that generation of southern intellectuals.

The intellectuals and the journalists had been born within the Jim Crow system of segregation and disfranchisement. The publicists of the New South insisted that regional progress depended upon the preservation of white supremacy; their followers, the reformers of the Progressive Era, endorsed the systematic legal subordination and separation of black southerners as the fundamental precondition to further progress: only if race relations remained forever frozen in that pattern could the South have social order and social reform. The generation then coming of age learned these lessons, emotionally as well as intellectually.

By the end of the 1920s, though, the journalists recognized that changes in race relations had occurred and that changes would continue. With other southern liberals, they strove to devise programs of reform that would contribute to southern progress without provoking the chaos of racial conflict. Their desire for better race relations flowed from their desire for southern progress, therefore, not from devotion to abstract liberal principles. Nonetheless, they recognized and struggled with the most difficult issue—both as intellectual problem and as public policy—before the South in the 1930s. That they reacted to Negro protest and the early stages of the Civil Rights movement with trepidation evidences, ironically, their success at devising a coherent and satisfying ideology and program for southern liberalism. Examination of that southern liberalism shows that the journalists neither intended nor expected the Civil Rights movement.

Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920–1944

1 Coming of Age in the Progressive South

The South’s leading liberal journalists came from various backgrounds and lived in different regions of the South. All had one common characteristic: as public advocates of southern liberalism, each of them spoke as a southerner. Each of them had learned of his region’s past in childhood and built his ideas on this foundation.

They could—and did—trace their ancestry back through southern history. John Temple Graves II, for instance, proudly acknowledged his blood connection to William Calhoun, the brother of John C. Calhoun. George Fort Milton’s great-grandfather, Dr. Tomlinson Fort, helped bring the Western and Atlantic Railroad to the settlement at Moccasin Bend on the Tennessee River that became Milton’s home of Chattanooga. In the ancestry-conscious Old Dominion, Virginius Dabney could claim the finest of family trees: among others, he counted as one of his forebears that powerful and protean symbol of the South and the nation, Thomas Jefferson. Not long after Jefferson had concluded its purchase from France, Hodding Carter’s great-great-grandfather came to Louisiana from Kentucky and soon became a wealthy New Orleanian. In order to have a retreat from recurrent outbreaks of yellow fever, he bought vast tracts of land north of the Crescent City in Tangipahoa Parish. Although the family holdings had diminished to some three hundred acres by the time of Carter’s birth in 1907, his father was still one of the parish’s most substantial landholders. These men, then, grew up with what Carter once called the assurance of belonging to a past that had antedated the community’s.¹

Such assurance did not require ancestors of prominence. Harry S. Ashmore, who received the Pulitzer Prize in 1958 as editor of the Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, explained this best in describing his own South Carolina childhood. After recounting the Confederate service of his grandfathers and the ties of kinship he shared throughout the state, Ashmore concluded: I grew up, then, in a place my own people, for better or worse, had helped create; if we actually owned very little of it (there were Ashmores of varying kind and condition, but I never met a rich one) it was nevertheless in a larger sense mine.² Family heritage bound these men to the South’s past and, as southern liberals, they would seek precedent and justification in the region’s history.

William Faulkner once declared that for every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863 . . . and Pickett himself . . . waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance. Although he described this adolescent’s daydream in 1948, it perhaps had its greatest appeal for his own generation of white southerners, those born in the decades on either side of 1900. Jonathan Daniels, born in 1902, declared, Mine, I suppose, was the last Southern generation reared in a combination of indignation and despair.³ Yet Daniels described his generation’s rearing in terms too narrow, for he and his fellows came of age during a rare period in their region’s history when young white southerners could remain loyal to the peculiar acts and heritage of their ancestors without considering themselves any the less American as a result.

This was the era of Progressivism, when southern reformers addressed social and economic problems with language and methods similar to their nonsouthern counterparts, an era climaxed by the election of Woodrow Wilson, a southern-born Democrat, to the presidency.⁴ This was also the era when southern whites disfranchised black voters and elaborated the legal system of racial segregation. Northern opinion acquiesced in the racial settlement. To the future southern liberals who grew to adulthood during these years, the Progressive Era gave a powerful legacy in race relations. In the years to come, even as they gradually abandoned the racist doctrines that justified segregation, they would still strive to reform the Jim Crow system, not to overthrow it.

Children born in the South at the turn of the century first learned their history from those who witnessed it: their grandparents. For example, while George Fort Milton’s father concentrated his attention on Tennessee’s contemporary political battles, Milton’s grandmother related to him his family history. She told him of her childhood in Milledgeville, Georgia’s antebellum capital, and of visits that leaders such as Alexander H. Stephens, Howell Cobb, and Robert Toombs made there. She had watched from the gallery as the state’s secession convention voted to leave the Union, and she described to the boy the scene that night when former governor Herschel V. Johnson, a friend of her father, came to their home and wept as he spoke of the state’s decision. In 1865 Sarah Fort married Dr. Harvey Oliver Milton, returned from his war service as a surgeon with Alabama troops. Their son, Milton’s father, was born in 1869, as the family struggled in the difficult years after the war. Milton long remembered his grandmother’s tales of life in a cabin in a corn patch in Reconstruction.⁵

In 1877, the Miltons abandoned farm life and moved to Chattanooga where Sarah’s brother, Tomlinson Fort, lived. This man perhaps did even more than his sister to make the Civil War a vivid memory for young Milton. In 1907, he took his thirteen-year-old great-nephew to Richmond for that year’s Confederate Reunion. From there they headed north, through the battlefields of Fort’s military service. Tracing the path of the Confederate army, they ended their northward journey at Gettysburg, where Milton’s great-uncle had been severely wounded.⁶

Although Virginius Dabney’s paternal grandfather had died in 1895, six years before his birth, there was a special bond between them: his name, too, had been Virginius Dabney. The first Virginius Dabney served the Confederacy on the staff of General John B. Gordon, but left the South after the war and made his career as master of the New York Latin School and as an author. In 1886, he published a popular novel of life in the Old Dominion before the war, The Story of Don Miff. Writing with wit and sentiment, he told the story of the happy days of aristocratic Virginia that the Civil War had swept into the abyss of the past. Dabney intended his book to stand as a monument to his father’s memory but willingly conceded the clearer picture and finer eulogy to his sister’s Memorials of a Southern Planter, first published in 1887. Susan Dabney Smedes wrote her father’s history for the enlightenment of his descendants. They will hear much of the wickedness of slavery and of slaveowners, she feared. I wish them to know of a good master.⁷

Young Virginius Dabney thus could read two compelling accounts of his family and the South in which they lived. His great-grandfather, Thomas Smith Gregory Dabney, had embodied the highest ideals of the planter class, earning the respect of neighbors, the loyalty of his slaves, and the love of his children. When the war came it devastated his land and changed his life; he moved to Baltimore after the war, far from the old plantation and the antebellum South. As did George Fort Milton, Virginius Dabney inherited a family history broken by war.⁸

Indeed, the war’s omnipresence in the lives of grandparents made it, through family stories, the central event in southern history for their grandchildren. Hodding Carter, born more than four decades after Appomattox, listened to his grandmother’s tales of the Reconstruction years when she sewed her husband’s Ku Klux Klan robes and he went out with his fellows and, Carter affectionately recalled, saved a large section of the South through some well-timed night riding and an unerring aim. Perhaps his grandmother exaggerated, but she also showed him evidence in the pardon that President Andrew Johnson had granted to her mother after the war: this pardon, necessary in order to retain the family holdings, had required the woman, a widow since the fighting at Shiloh, to travel to Washington and swear her allegiance to the South’s conquerors. Aunt Rachel, who lived with the Carters, told the boy of life in Union-occupied New Orleans under General Ben Butler, whose memory she hated. And, outside the home, there were the aging veterans of whom young Carter and his playmates were so proud and not a little afraid, telling stories that made the Civil War and Reconstruction a personal, bitter, and sacred reality. To question the veracity of this history seemed not only a heresy, but also an act of disloyalty to one’s family. As Carter said, Did we not have our grandfathers and grandmothers as proofs?⁹

One could repeat the outlines of Carter’s experience from the boyhood recollections of any of these men. They learned of the past from family members—John Temple Graves declared that his grandmother’s narratives of life in Yankee-occupied Georgia were the first dramas that he knew—and they learned simply by virtue of their existence in the turn-of-the-century South. Even Ralph McGill, whose East Tennessee heritage provided him with grandfathers who had fought on each side during the war, thrilled to the romance of the Lost Cause and fought bloody-nosed fist fights in defense of the Confederacy. The South’s many memorial rituals to the veterans of the conflict added an almost religious quality to the child’s discovery of his tradition. When McGill served as a guide to veterans in Chattanooga for the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Chattanooga, in 1913, it seemed no less appropriate than a Catholic boy’s service as an acolyte.¹⁰

Although the daydream of a different Gettysburg must have occupied the occasional thoughts of these boys, almost all learned at an early age that they could honor the heroes of the Confederacy without feeling bound to defend the South’s secession from the Union. A remarkable number of the South’s liberal journalists identified themselves with the tradition of antebellum Unionism, which some had learned of in the stories of their ancestors. Milton’s great-grandfather, Tomlinson Fort, represented Georgia in Congress from 1827 to 1831. These were the years of national battles over tariff policy that led in 1832 to South Carolina’s effort to nullify the impost within its borders, an act that historians have described as the prelude to civil war. Although he had voted against the offending tariff, Fort did not condone nullification. In the summer of 1831 he wrote to his friend John C. Calhoun, unaware of the South Carolinian’s central role in the state’s action, and petitioned him to speak out against the proposed policy. Fort retired from Congress that year and delivered a farewell address to his constituents expressing his great regret that many Georgians supported South Carolina’s rebellious course. Although Fort died in 1859, Sarah Milton’s story of Herschel Johnson’s visit to her father’s home for commiseration after Georgia left the Union suggests that had he lived, Fort would have also opposed secession.¹¹

Thomas Smith Gregory Dabney admired Henry Clay and voted with Clay’s Whig party. As civil war loomed, Dabney stood by his Old-Line Whig principles, and that, Susan Dabney Smedes wrote, is as much as to say he was a Union man. For Dabney, the first lost cause was the unsuccessful fight he and other Mississippi Unionists waged to prevent their state from leaving the Union.¹²

Others learned, if not ancestral Unionism, at least a view that— with hindsight—described the decision at Gettysburg and Appomattox as for the best. Jonathan Daniels wrote that his paternal grandfather had been a protesting non-combatant in the divided Union; his death from wounds received when irregulars fired upon a passenger ship, leaving a widow and three sons to struggle in poverty, seemed to Daniels to symbolize the tragedy of the Civil War for the South. Gerald W. Johnson recalled an uncle, a Confederate veteran, who insisted to his nephew: Yes, they had more men, and more artillery, and more rations, and everything else, but, boy, don’t you ever believe that that was what whipped us. We lost that war because God Almighty had decreed that slavery had to go. Johnson heeded these words. A novel he published in 1930 tells the story of a Scottish family in North Carolina before 1865. The novel’s heroine, family matriarch Catherine Campbell Whyte, counseled her legislator son-in-law to vote against secession, and even in the midst of the war-wrought devastation of her family she damned the war as the Devil’s work for which both North and South deserved blame. Ralph McGill could easily reach a similar conclusion, for he grew up in East Tennessee, a stronghold of Unionism.¹³

This Unionist aspect to their understanding of the South’s past carried important implications for their thinking as writers and editors. Knowing their ancestors as good and honorable people, they could never accept any sweeping condemnation of the South and its past. Nor could they see secession as anything other than a decision reached in political controversy, never as the inevitable expression of southern destiny. Combining this with their knowledge from family experience that the war had brought reversals in the South’s fortunes, they saw the surrender at Appomattox as the beginning of a new era in southern history.

Out of the Unionist tradition, then, they put their historical focus on the war’s aftermath, Reconstruction, as the main determinant of the South’s history since the war. In this view external factors, specifically the actions of the victorious North, were the shaping forces in the region’s new age. In the early twentieth century, however, the nation was nearing its destination on the road to reunion between North and South, as nationalism overwhelmed sectionalism. With their Unionist sympathies, these young men found it easy to accept the contemporary national popular and scholarly interpretations of the Civil War and its aftermath without questioning the teachings of their forebears.

The most powerful statement of this nationalist interpretation was D. W. Griffith’s magnificent film Birth of a Nation, which appeared in 1915. Griffith presented the Civil War as a battle between honorable, heroic men, who fought on both sides for valid reasons. The North’s victory marked a triumph for the nation, a triumph that the South accepted so long as it remained expressed in the nobility and mercy of Abraham Lincoln, a truly national figure. But the Emancipator fell to an assassin, and vengeful northern partisans grasped the reins of the government, perverting the national victory into triumph of a single section. These bitter men, the Radical Republicans, imposed on the defeated white South the horrors of Negro rule, which Griffith exemplified in scenes of comically inept black legislators and in the attempted rape of an innocent white girl by a dissolute black brute. Desperation inspired the film’s southern protagonist to conceive a patriotic white organization, the Ku Klux Klan, which raced across the countryside to redeem the black-besieged South. Austin Stoneman, the film’s leading Radical Republican, happened to be present when the Klansmen saved his daughter from the foul embrace of a lust-maddened Negro politician. Finally seeing the error of his ways, Stoneman repented his Reconstruction policies. The film ended with North and South now standing together as a single great nation.

Birth of a Nation cost more to make than had any previous film, and ticket prices reflected this. Robert Sklar suggests that Griffith made the high cost of admission a virtue and purposely sought to attract an audience of community leaders and opinion makers to his cinematic epic. Indeed, President Woodrow Wilson—no ordinary community leader and opinion maker—saw the film at a special White House performance and, according to legend, endorsed it as like writing history with lightning. The