The South and the Revolution Against Nihilism

That the South was the first section of the United States to sense an enemy in fascism was indicated not only by polls of opinions, but also by its ardor in preparing for the fight. On the surface it is an anomaly of the first order that this most conservative of sections should have discerned a foe in the regimes gathering strength in Europe, for in open debate the South would have been hard put to it to distinguish between some of the slogans of the New Order and the tenets of its own faith, sealed with Confederate blood and affirmed in many a post-bellum oration. That the Southern whites considered themselves Herrenvolk in relation to the Negro is one of the obvious features of the sociological landscape, and belief in the influence of blood and soil is powerful with them, as with any agrarian people. The glorification of the martial spirit, the distrust of urban liberalism, the hatred of money economy are pages that might be found in the book of any unreconstructed Southerner. The restoration of medieval concepts in Europe might almost have seemed the Confederate's dream or reversing history and regaining the way of life which he lost in 1865. Why then the deep, instinctive hostility of the South to Hitler and his allies?

To answer this question one must look at the continuum of history and distinguish some cultural stages. In the ideological conflict between the South and Fascist Europe the world before the French Revolution looks at the world after the French Revolution and finds it hateful.

The Fascist regimes of Europe lie not in the period of French Revolution, but beyond it; they mark, in fact, an end to that great epoch of society. From 1789 to 1914 the ideas released by this great transformation made irresistible headway until they had destroyed in every center of influence the ancient system of feudalism. Society was changed from a hierarchy, from a state with a corporative form, held together by traditions, bonds of sentiment, and a vision of the whole, into the undifferentiated democratic mass, with free competition regarded as the sole means of measuring position and power. This meant change from a more or less articulated order into an unlimited number of groups and individuals engaged in self-promotion. It was supposed by liberal thinkers that this change represented a permanent rectification of society, in which all injustices, both those inherited from the past and those proceeding from ignorance or malice, would be removed.

The first World War and the Great Depression which followed proved that this condition, far from being a permanent stabilization, carried the seeds of its own destruction. Unregulated competition, unplanned industrial expansion, and private control of surplus and scarcity meant chaos, which rendered unattainable the bourgeois ideal of prosperity and security. When the truth of this became apparent, it was plain that the French Revolution, with its emphasis upon individual liberty and its belief in self-operating laws, had finished its role in Western society. The great experiment, which the South with incredible stubbornness refused to try, ended in failure.

The first World War began all over Europe the liquidation of the class which that revolution had place in power, and it was not unnatural that this liquidation should have proceeded the farthest in those countries which got the worst settlement. With economic anarchy, with the bourgeois pushed toward the proletarian level, with professional men forced to seek employment as common laborers, it was appearing that nothing less than a complete rationalization of economic life would permit the state to endure at all. Signs are not wanting that the whole Western world is being pushed toward a reorganization dictated by these facts.

When it becomes necessary in the interests of saving the whole whole to abandon laissez-faire, individualism, and belief in inalienable personal rights, then some new order is on the way toward establishment. In the forcing house of war, revolution, and economic breakdown the countries of Central Europe arrived at this crisis, while the more prosperous nations to the west were surviving on the strength of their accumulations.

As a general thing American social developments lag a good many years behidn those across the water. Slavery made its last stand in America in the middle of the nineteenth century—a last stand. Capitalism reached its apogee in the United States after virtually all of the European nations had been driven to adopt various measures of socialism. The relationship comes to this: the South, which has never entered the French Revolution, cannot understand the forces which are driving these nations to leave it. And more conservative than America as a whole, it shows an almost unanimous opposition to those tendecies which would destroy poetic-religious myths and create a mass state

The South retains enough of the medieval world-picture, enough of the impulses which gave Western civilization its forms and its coherence, to be shocked by this new and outrageous radicalism. If the French Revolution represented one stage of dissolution—and we need only remind ourselves how destructive it was of ancient forms—then this represents another and a greater. That the South was acting in accordance with deep-rooted traditions is proved by the fact that it never took the businessman's attitude toward this threat. It realized that as soon as the first encroachment is made, the battle is on, and there can be no cessation until a victor has been decided. The suggestion that a movement striking at the heart of all beliefs and able to grow with what it fed on could bought off—unhappy delusion of our statesmen blinded by bourgeois liberalism—found no acceptance in this section, which has never made money, which which has never ceased to study human nature, its projection, politics.

In strong contrast to the Middle West, the South has a metaphysical instinct which tells it where it stands in any contingency. It cannot analyze, it cannot explain to the world, but the secret voice is a true one, and it valiantly if hopelessly battles for its position. The Middle West has no such anchorage. It is of diverse heritage, prosperous, inexperienced in tragedy—really convinced that tragedy should leave it alone. When the challenge came, therefore, it displayed only vexation, and behaved as if it did not live in a world in which tirals are part of an inevitable lot. To the Middle West history is a kind of tableau, such as one might inspect half incredulously at a World's Fair. The South has learned history the hard way; it does not have to ask of the crimes and follies of mankind, "Did they really do those things?"

The South perceived intuitively that the new radicalisms of Europe represent a final assault upon society as that term has been understood in Western civilization. Society implies a structure; it consists of centers of authority, degrees of power and prestige, and an inevitable system of ranking even where representative government is in effect. But the tendency of the nihilist revolutions in Europe is toward the destruction of this and the substitution of the formless mass manipulated by a group of Machiavellians. Distinctions in society, however, are invidious they can be made to appear by doctrinaires, are what gives richness, variety, and freedom to the life of a people, and the exchange of them for some extreme equalitarianism results in regimentation with authority lodged ultimately in a dictator. Centralism always points to an alliance between the mass and a single leader purporting to be their champion; and, conversely, decentralization leaves the way open for local authority and provides opportuntiy for individuals to express themselves as such. Actually this was the trend against which the South fought in 1861-65, although other issues were allowed to obscure that feature of the conflict. Now, as it sees society threatened by the new and extreme proletarian nihilism, it expresses once more the conservative reaction and girds for battle. It understands correctly that he promise of fascism to restore the ancient virtues is counteracted by this process, and that the denial of an ethical basis for the state means a loss of freedom and humanity.

In accordance with this pattern, the coup of the Facists constitutes the kind of usurpation toward which radical democracy always tends. It is an old story, made spectacular by some modern techniques. Against this alliance of mass and self-appointed leader every traditional society has protested, because it realizes that in its formlessness and in its insistent pressure against the usages which have the sanction of time and experience—the "rubbish of past centuries" of the Jacobins—it moves toward a kind of extinction, often not suspected until the time is too late for reparation.

The South, moreover, is part of the Western world which has suffered from what Hermann Rauschning has called "the fading out of a spiritual tradition among the historic ruling class." Because the Southern aristocracy was an aristocracy of achievement far more than is generally supposed, it has some vitality left. It has never abdicated, it commands some solid respect at home, a different thing entirely from silly adulation by elements at the North, which it would be better off without. Wherever it has been strongest, there the - demagogues have made least headway; indeed, there is a close correlation between the decay of this class and poor white ascendancy in Southern States. One cannot visualize a Huey Long in Virginia for precisely this reason. The collapse of traditional society in the Southern States has shown the same consequences.

The South, by its firm grasp of the traditions of our civilization, has had a great part in giving us one more chance for the conservative solution. While the old sources of power and self-confidence were being weakened by debunking and scientific investigation, it clung to the belief that man is not saved by science alone, that myths and sentiments are part of the constitution of a nation, and that poetry ultimately decides more issues than economics. In the choice that had to be made its voice was perhaps decisive; and the choice was between a world illuminated by religious and poetical concepts and made human by respect for personality, and a world of materialism and technology, of an ever great feeding of the physical man, which is nihilism.

In this, and not in natural belligerency, or poverty, or loyalty to the Roosevelt administration is to be read the explanation of its role in World War II.

The South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. XLIII, No. 2. (April 1944), pp. 194-198.