Dr. Clyde Wilson, Abbeville Institute blog:
America is now governed as an ever more centralised nation/state with an increasingly imperialist and left-authoritarian character. But America as a society and a people is no longer coherent. A people, according to St, Augustine, are those “who hold loved things in common.” By that reading Americans are not a people.
A recent poll indicates that 44% of Southern people are in favour of separating themselves from blue-state America. The number includes 50% of Independents and 66% of Republicans, representing the more conservative part of the population. Although the fat and satisfied Republican officeholders are not about to embrace the ideas of the grassroots. The same poll shows that 39% of the people of the Pacific states also favour independence from the U.S., although probably for different reasons than the Southerners.
In these times the beleaguered Southern people are throwing up new and interesting voices of defense. It has been evident since at least the 1980s that the ruling elite and the apparatus of the U.S. government is not “a government of the people.” The South has no place in a world-wide military empire and crony capitalist state.
The survival and even resurgence of Southern identity in a regime that intensively treats Southerners as a contemptible non-people without any rights to their own history and values, may be surprising. But Southern consciousness has always grown stronger when under attack. Tearing down a statue of Robert E. Lee is bound to create a reaction—such vandalism is a product of ignorance and petty malice that makes decent, civilised people angry.
The Twelve Southerners who published I’ll Take My Stand in 1930 lived in a strong and widely accepted American state that was not particularly intrusive culturally and morally. They did not imagine an independent South but only hoped to enlighten a materialistic people about certain humane ways that the South could still demonstrate…
History has moved on and we are now in a different time. New times bring new thoughts and a hope for new solutions among people imposed upon by the regime under which they live. The South remains a living and loved reality to a great many people. It is the oldest of American things. Indeed, there is nothing more American than the South…
I graduated from Grady High School in 1953. The school was named after Henry Woodfin Grady in 1947. In February 2016, the school newspaper argued that Henry Grady’s name should be removed from the school because he allegedly was a white supremacist. There were vigorous protests over the name change by graduates of Grady.
Despite that in July 2020, the Atlanta Board of Education formed a committee to consider a new name. On December 15, 2020, the Board officially announced the name change to Midtown High School effective June 1, 2021.
Henry Grady was a booster of the New South.
For what it is worth here is a speech Grady gave to the Bay State Club of Boston, 1889.
” I attended a funeral once in Pickens county in my State. . . . This funeral was peculiarly sad. It was a poor “one gallus” fellow, whose breeches struck him under the armpits and hit him at the other end about the knee—he didn’t believe in decollete clothes. They buried him in the midst of a marble quarry: they cut through solid marble to make his grave; and yet a little tombstone they put above him was from Vermont. They buried him in the heart of a pine forest, and yet the pine coffin was imported from Cincinnati. They buried him within touch of an iron mine, and yet the nails in his coffin and the iron in the shovel that dug his grave were imported from Pittsburgh. They buried him by the side of the best sheep-grazing country on the earth, and yet the wool in the coffin bands and the coffin bands themselves were brought from the North. The South didn’t furnish a thing on earth for that funeral but the corpse and the hole in the ground. There they put him away and the clods rattled down on his coffin, and they buried him in a New York coat and a Boston pair of shoes and a pair of breeches from Chicago and a shirt from Cincinnati, leaving him nothing to carry into the next world with him to remind him of the country in which he lived, and for which he fought for four years, but the chill of blood in his veins and the marrow in his bones.
Now we have improved on that. We have got the biggest marble-cutting establishment on earth within a hundred yards of that grave. We have got a half-dozen woolen mills right around it, and iron mines, and iron furnaces, and iron factories. We are coming to meet you. We are going to take a noble revenge, as my friend, Mr. Carnegie, said last night, by invading every inch of your territory with iron, as you invaded ours twenty-nine years ago.”
Wow, that would be a great outcome, Fred. Would that it could be the case…