"The ambition of the South is to out-Yankee the Yankee." --Henry Watterson, 1877
"We are in favor of the South, from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, being thoroughly and permanently Yankeeized." --Vicksburg Herald, 1881
(Both are quoted in C. Vann Woodward's "Origins of the New South, 1877-1913")
Last week in this column I attributed a remark from an essay about Charles Portis to Portis himself, and proceeded to argue with it at length. The remark, about the "transitional" nature of Little Rock, came from Will Stephenson, writing in Harper's on the Library of America's recent release of its edition of Portis' collected works, edited by Little Rock's Jay Jennings.
I'm mortified by my error, but the good news is that Charles Portis never called Little Rock "transitional, incomplete both in its progress and in its decline," and never said "nothing entirely succeeds [there], but nothing entirely fails either."
The lines from Portis that I had gone looking for in Stephenson's essay come from "Combinations of Jacksons," a short family memoir that Portis published in The Atlantic in 1999. It is collected in "Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany," also edited by Jennings.
Portis is talking about the almost rhythmic emergence ("at intervals of about five years") of proclamations from Southern editorial writers of "the End of the War, at Long Last, and the blessed if somewhat tardy arrival of The New South."
By the New South, Portis says, "they seem to mean something the same as, culturally identical with, at one with, the rest of the country." This is the Yankification hoped for by Watterson and the Vicksburg Herald. After more than a century, Portis says, the editorial writers may finally be right. He points to "the new and alien splendor to be seen all around us in cities with tall, dark, and featureless glass towers."
Tall, dark, featureless glass towers. As I said last week, they can alienate and depress a perfectly healthy person who's just trying to bag some mulch. How did they get here? In Little Rock, the first was constructed in 1959-1960, but it's a manifestation of trends that were already underway in the 1870s.
Newspaperman Henry Grady made the idea of the New South famous, though he did not claim credit for coining the term. As one of the owners of the Atlanta Herald, he wrote and published an editorial called "The New South" in 1874, though his most famous articulations of the idea come from speeches he made in New York in 1886 and Boston in 1889, long after he had become a publisher and editor at the Atlanta Constitution.
Grady's New South program, as the New Georgia Encyclopedia puts it, called for "Northern investment, Southern industrial growth, diversified farming, and white supremacy." The claims he made in New York about the condition of Southern Black people are patronizing, with just a little fog over the facts: he assured his New York audience that "No section shows a more prosperous laboring population than the Negroes of the South, none in fuller sympathy with the employing and land-owning class. He shares our school fund, has the fullest protection of our laws and the friendship of our people. Self-interest, as well as honor, demand that he should have this."
Grady made the 1889 trip up north (which tried his poor health and led to his death) in order to campaign against a Republican bill that would have permitted the federal government to intervene in Southern elections to ensure the voting rights of Black people.
The first extended treatment of the New South idea to appear in the Arkansas Gazette is a reprint of an editorial from the Memphis Appeal, published May 11, 1877. "In all the Southern states," says the Appeal, "the press and the people are united and enthusiastic on the subject of manufacturing establishments."
The Appeal notes that William Read Miller (governor of Arkansas from 1877 to 1881) had addressed a letter to "A citizen of Maine" in which "he shows that his State has everything that is necessary to make a prosperous people."
In weeks to come, we'll look at outside investment in manufacturing and extractive industry (timber, minerals, petroleum) in Arkansas, at resistance to the New South (John Gould Fletcher, one of the Agrarians, is one of ours), and at that push for modernity called Urban Renewal that gutted the core of our capital city.
Another correction to last week's column: A reader of this paper who lives in Michigan pointed out that it entered the Union in 1837, not 1836. And because I have many dear neighbors who read this column, I would like to note that my notion of despair-inducing glass towers does not include the brick-and-glass buildings that went up in the River Market in the 2000s. Those are full of people--residents, waiters, bartenders, shopkeepers--who make this place a place, not a pass-through.
Finally, in celebration of the opening of the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, I have a recommendation for visitors: Explore not only MacArthur Park, but the surrounding neighborhoods. On foot. Or stroller or wheelchair.
Some friends mentioned Sunday that on opening night, they walked north from AMFA to their office building in the River Market, and loved walking slowly down old streets they usually only travel by car.
Heading south from AMFA, the pedestrian bridge and the Commerce Street bridge are safe places to cross I-630 on foot and get a bite to eat in the South on Main neighborhood. You will see some beautiful old houses and interesting new ones, and will most likely encounter some characters. You will discover that the cultural homogenization that Portis lamented has not entirely come about. It will make this place feel like a place.