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New Southern Writers
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14113 |
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BOOK WORLD
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1 / 1988 |
2,845 Words |
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David A. Hallman
David A. Hallman teaches English at James Madison
University. |
THE NEW WRITERS OF THE SOUTH
Edited by Charles East
Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1987
296 pp., $25.00
"There was a South of slavery and secession--that South is dead. There is a South of union and freedom--that South, thank God, is living, breathing, growing every hour." Thus, Atlanta editor/journalist Henry W. Grady opened one of the famous speeches in American history. "The New South" was delivered in 1886 in New York City. It arose from the pains and humiliations of Reconstruction and was delivered to the New England Society, a group of important northern financiers and public figures. Grady's speech was a well-crafted plea for a reconciliation between North and South and for economic support to develop a new region fashioned after the image of its industrialized neighbor. The bitterness of the Civil War had been largely forgotten, he said, though Grady acknowledged that some people still thought General Sherman was "a kind of careless man about fire." The South under Reconstruction had "fallen in love with work" and had even "learned that one northern immigrant is worth fifty foreigners." However ironic the description of carpetbaggers, Grady's message was clear: The future would be shared, and "American."
But historically southerners have proven to be nothing if not stubborn. Having lost the military conflict and been forced back into the Union, the region dragged its heels when asked to march in step toward a future it had just sought to avoid. Political strains, social and racial conditions, economic realities, and just plain old, ingrained cultural conservatism
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