The New South
Jonathan Daniels of Raleigh, North Carolina, a Southerner ‘as far back as there have been Europeans in the South’s lost woods and waters,’ went exploring in white linens and Plymouth car to discover the South. He returned, one suspects, badly scratched by the thorn thickets of paradox through which he moved, bearing a book of findings, A Southerner Discovers the South (Macmillan, $3.00), in his bleeding hands. Inasmuch as the South has been discovered on an average of twice a week by Northerners ranging in time and temperament from Ulysses Grant to Al Jolson, and has latterly been hailed as the Promised Land by textile gentry from Pennsylvania and Michigan who are now forbidden by law to use prison labor so long as it is behind bars. it is startling to find a Southern journalist chugging up a peak in Darien to take a look for himself.
Mr. Daniels knows, of course, that no man can discover the South. Region differs from region; state from state; county from county. No single truism covers the whole area. No common denominator links all its parts. The nearest approach to such a denominator is Coca-Cola and evangelical religion, but the consumption of the one is variable, and the other is dying of a galloping consumption brought on by automobile riding. Knowing this, Mr. Daniels has contented himself with the role of literate and witty traveler writing to folks back home about the strange lands and peoples among whom he is sojourning, leaving the perplexities of sociology and the documentations of economics to the books of specialists that one may (if he is so unwise) read around the fireside in winter.
The author saw the mill villages of North Carolina, where, he thinks, the workers prefer freedom of movement (Ford fever) to comfort or security; mills hidden behind flesh-tearing barbed wire; and the lumbering shadow of John L. Lewis dancing elephantinely across the white-columned homes of mill owners.
He went down to the TVA, where the government is trying to galvanize 2,500,000 persons into action with colonic irrigations of electricity; to Scottsboro, where the Boys committed the Rape in interstate commerce; to Nashville, where the ’iris gardens were blooming . . . the legislature was in session . . . and the emissaries of Boss Crump were fighting to make Tennessee wet against the stern, religious hill folk who wanted to keep it dry’; to Memphis, ‘corrupt and content, hard-boiled and romantic.’
He visited Charleston, where The War is being belatedly won by selling antiques and early vegetables to rich Yankees; the Mississippi Delta, where the sterile mule and the prolific Negro outnumber the land-poor whites; Natchez, the Carcassonne of the Old South; and New Orleans, where men rose, and still rise, from carpetbags to riches.
Out of it all emerges a tolerant, highly readable, amusing, and urbane book. If you have n’t white linens, a Plymouth car, and a zeal for exploring, you may learn a great deal about the South and be bemused into the bargain by reading A Southerner Discovers the South.
DAVID L. COHN