Voting Rights and the Court:
Drawing the Lines
By Laughlin McDonald

Vol. 15, No. 3, 1993, pp. 1-6

On the last day of the 1993 term, the Supreme Court handed down one of the most controversial voting rights decisions of the last ten years, Shaw v. Reno. The Court held that white residents of North Carolina could challenge the state’s majority African American 12th congressional district because it was “so bizarre on its face that it is ‘unexplainable on grounds other than race.'” Although the holding of the case is quite narrow—there are not many, if any, districts as irregularly shaped as the 12th, which has been dubbed the “I-85 district” because it follows an interstate highway—it opens the door for opponents of the Voting Rights Act to question the propriety of all race-conscious redistricting.

Shaw v. Reno has stirred up public debate, but in fact the creation of minority-controlled election districts has always been controversial, as the courts and the larger society struggle to reconcile the competing goals of protecting minority rights and achieving a society that is color blind. The Supreme Court, for example, in 1971 in Whitcomb v. Chavis, dismissed a challenge by black voters to multi-member districts for the Indiana legislature after holding that the plaintiffs were not entitled to single-member districts drawn to ensure the representation of racial and ethnic minorities. Reflecting a strong bias in favor of majoritarianism and judicial

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neutrality in the political arena, the Court conceded that the voting power of black residents may have been canceled out, but concluded that “this seems a mere euphemism for political defeat at the polls.”

Two years later the Court reversed itself and held in White v. Regester that African-Americans and Hispanics in Texas were entitled to single-member districts for the legislature where, based on the “totality of circumstances,” multi-member districts had the effect of diluting their voting strength by denying them the equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. White became the reigning standard in vote dilution cases and resulted in the creation of minority-controlled election districts throughout the South and other sections of the country.

But again, the Court had second thoughts. In 1980 in City of Mobile v. Bolden, it held that black voters challenging at-large elections for the city commission had to show as a condition for obtaining single member districts, not simply that their voting strength was diluted, but that the system was established or was being maintained with a racially discriminatory purpose. The decision in Bolden effectively took voting rights back to the days of Whitcomb v. Chavis.

Congress, at the urging of the minority and civil rights communities, responded to Bolden in 1982 by amending the Voting Rights Act to restore the “results,” or totality of circumstances, test of White v. Regester. But it did so in the face of loud opposition from the Reagan

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administration, a few conservative members of Congress, and a small coterie of lawyers and academics.

The opponents recited a litany of horribles before Congress. The amendment would, they said, create racial division, it would “pit race against race,” impose a quota system for office holding, cause resegregation, and reduce the incentives for building racial coalitions. Senator Orrin Hatch warned that the amendment would lead to the creation of “political ghettos,” and that minority influence would suffer enormously.

Congress rejected these arguments and passed the amendment by overwhelming majorities in both houses. It concluded that the totality of circumstances test had a proven and reassuring track record which belied the speculations and dire predictions of the opponents. According to the senate subcommittee, saying that minority-controlled districts were the cause of, rather than a response to, racial polarization was “like saying that it is the doctor’s thermometer which causes high fever.”

Two days after the congressional amendment the Supreme Court, continuing to reflect institutional indecision and ambivalence in the area of minority vote dilution, reconsidered the implications of the Bolden decision in a case with similar facts from Burke County, Georgia. In Rogers v. Lodge it held that while racial purpose was required for a constitutional violation, racial purpose could be inferred from the discriminatory effect of a challenged voting practice. The Court for all practical purposes restored the test from White v. Regester.

In Thornburg v. Gingles (1986), the Supreme Court decided its first case under the 1982 Voting Rights Act amendment, and greatly simplified the test for minority vote dilution. It held that where a minority was geographically compact, or could constitute a majority in one or more single-member districts, where voting was racially polarized, and where whites voted as a bloc usually to defeat the candidates preferred by the minority, majority minority single-member districts were required.

Many in the civil rights community believed that Congress and the Court had finally silenced the critics of remedial districting schemes. Indeed, the progress in minority office holding after 1982, brought about in large measure by the creation of majority minority districts, was impressive and broadly accepted. A forthcoming book edited by Chandler Davidson and Bernard Grofman, which promises to be a definitive study of the Voting Rights Act and the impact of district voting at the state and local levels, describes the gains in minority political participation and office holding during this period in wholly positive terms as “The Quiet Revolution.”

But the critics refused to be silenced. Throughout the 1980s they remained more or less on the fringe of public discussion and continued to complain in articles and an occasional book that majority minority districts were “electoral apartheid,” and that the Voting Rights Act had been transformed into an unwanted form of affirmative action. During the 1990s redistricting, however, they gained new allies—Democrats and members of the press who charged that the Republican party, including the Republican-controlled Department of Justice, was systematically and cynically exploiting the Voting Rights Act by promoting and requiring the creation of majority minority districts simply because the by-product was more solidly white, Republican districts.

There is no question that the Republican party adopted a deliberate strategy of promoting an increase in the number of minority congressional and legislative districts to further its own partisan goals. It also made early and large investments in redistricting software which it offered without charge to minority and civil rights groups. The extent to which the Republican strategy worked is debatable. (The software, at any rate, had so many bugs and was so expensive to operate that it was never of any use to civil rights groups.)

In Virginia, for example, there was a big increase in the number of black legislative districts, but Democrats blunted Republican gains by pairing fourteen Republican incumbents in seven districts, and redrawing other Republican-controlled seats. The North Carolina congressional plan created two majority black districts, but at the same time protected all the non-retiring Democratic incumbents. In Georgia, on the other hand, Republicans increased their share of congressional seats from one to four directly as a result of an increase from one to three in the number of majority-black congressional districts.

There is far less evidence that the Department of Justice was part of the Republican strategy and was acting merely out of partisanship. While the interests of the Department and the party may have been congruent, the evidence shows basically that the Department of Justice was enforcing the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act in the manner intended by Congress, vigorously and fairly.

The opponents of race-conscious districting got a second boost from a wholly unexpected quarter, a handful of black elected officials. No doubt venting their partisan frustrations over the Republicans’ redistricting strategy, they lashed out at the concept of creating more majority minority districts. One of the most visible was

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John Lewis, a hero of the civil rights movement and the highly respected representative from the majority-black 5th congressional district in Georgia.

During the midst of the most successful redistricting ever, in which majority black congressional districts were drawn for the first time since Reconstruction in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, Lewis was quoted in USA Today as saying that the creation of majority minority districts “looks too much like South Africa. It seems like we’re creating little black townships. You shouldn’t just put people together because they are the same color.” Those were, of course, verbatim the words of the opponents of the 1982 amendment of the Voting Rights Act.

Lewis was not alone. Several members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Louis Stokes, Alan Wheat, Mike Espy, and Craig Washington, along with Dan Blue, North Carolina House majority leader, and Lois DeBerry, speaker pro tem of the Tennessee House, filed a controversial amicus brief in the Supreme Court in a redistricting case from Ohio, Voinovich v. Quilter. The brief, which was written essentially by the Democratic party, argued that the Voting Rights Act was not intended to lead to “political segregation” in which minority voters controlled a few districts but lacked “influence” in the rest. It warned against entrenching “separate-but-equal elections as a permanent feature of the American landscape.”

The controversy over minority voting rights was stoked further after President Clinton nominated Lani Guinier as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, and then abruptly withdrew the nomination because he thought her views were too radical. Guinier was sharply attacked by the 1982 coterie of academics and some

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members of Congress as being a proponent of “quotas” for minority office holding and “vote-rigging schemes.” In fact she was not. Much of the criticism of Guinier was simply a replay of that made in the past by the traditional opponents of effective civil rights enforcement.

Guinier has proposed the voluntary use of limited and cumulative voting as alternative remedies for minority vote dilution, but so have a lot of others, including federal judge John Minor Wisdom, one of the leading jurists of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Limited and cumulative voting, whatever their merits, cannot accurately be characterized as “quotas” or “vote-rigging schemes.”

In touting the advantages of limited and cumulative voting, however, Guinier credited some of the old criticism of districts by saying that the alternative procedures would avoid “arbitrarily separating groups to create separate majorities in order to increase their share,” would encourage “cross-racial coalitions,” and would “reduce racial polarization.” But that was not enough to appease the quota police, or save her nomination. Other statements by her of the necessity of “disaggregating majority interests in a system dominated by irrational prejudice,” were too problematical for many in the U.S. Senate, and finally for the president himself.

The Guinier nomination, the Republicans’ redistricting strategy and the Democrats’ reaction to it, and the controversial amicus brief may have had no impact on the deliberations of the Court. They showed, however, that race-conscious remedies in voting remain a controversial issue, even to some extent in the minority community.

After the opinion in Shaw v. Reno, the Congressional Black Caucus, some of whose members’ districts were suddenly put at risk, denounced the decision and said it casts “a chilling pall across the face of electoral politics.” As for creating majority minority districts, the caucus was of the view that it “is a clear and warranted practice.” Lewis for his part quickly denounced Shaw v. Reno as “the greatest threat to the Voting Rights Act since it was written in August 6, 1965. If it wasn’t for the Voting Rights Act, it would still be primarily white men in blue suits in Congress.” But the retractions, of course, came too late. Echoing the “political segregation” language of the controversial amicus brief, the Court held that race-conscious redistricting “bears an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid.”

It is impossible to predict the impact of Shaw v. Reno, particularly in an area of the law as volatile as vote dilution and redistricting. However, taken purely as a legal document the decision can and should be read narrowly.

First, the Court did not invalidate the North Carolina plan. It ruled only that a district that is so bizarre on its face that it is unexplainable on grounds other than race may be challenged on constitutional grounds. Few districts should meet this threshold test.

Second, the decision holds or implies that even a “bizarre” district would be constitutional if it were in fact explainable on grounds other than race, or if it furthered a compelling state interest and were narrowly tailored to promote that interest. Although the Court did not decide the question, drawing a district to comply with the Voting Rights Act should constitute a compelling state interest. Whether the district were narrowly tailored would depend, presumably, on whether a more compact, more aesthetically pleasing minority district could be drawn. A somewhat more compact second majority-black district could in fact have been drawn in North Carolina in another part of the state, but the I-85 district was adopted to protect incumbents.

Third, Shaw must be read in conjunction with Voinovich v. Quilter, decided by the Court in March of this year. In Voinovich, the district court invalidated an Ohio legislative redistricting plan on the ground, among others, that it contained several majority-black districts. The district court said that the Voting Rights Act prohibited the creation of any majority minority districts unless they were necessary to remedy a violation. In a unani-

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mous opinion written by Justice O’Connor, the Court held that the act did not prohibit a state from creating majority-black districts, and that a plan could violate the act only if the plaintiffs showed that it had the effect of denying or abridging the voting strength of a protected class.

Thus, Shaw and Voinovich may fairly be said to stand for the propositions that majority minority districts are presumptively valid under the Voting Rights Act, and that a district may be challenged under the Constitution only where it is extremely irregular on its face. But even such a district would be constitutional if it were explainable on grounds other than race, or if it furthered a compelling state interest and were narrowly tailored to promote that interest.

No matter how narrowly Shaw v. Reno can be read, discrimination-prone jurisdictions, or those that want to maintain the status quo, as well as judges who are unsympathetic to the claims of minority plaintiffs, will doubtlessly argue that the decision should be applied as broadly as possible to draw into question all majority minority districts that are not perfectly symmetrical. Since “bizarreness” is inevitably in the eye of the beholder, Shaw v. Reno will at the least generate a new wave of voting rights litigation challenging majority minority districts on the ground that they are not compact.

Compactness, as Shaw v. Reno holds, is now relevant in redistricting. But it should be a functional rather than an aesthetic concept as the Court suggests.

Legislative or congressional districts may have an irregular shape to accommodate geographic features, such as rivers and mountain ranges. Districts for a city may be irregular because, as a result of patchwork annexations, the boundaries of the city are themselves irregular. Districts may be irregular to protect incumbents, or districts may be irregular to insure that the voting strength of minorities is not diluted. By the same token, a district may be perfectly symmetrical but fragment concentrations of minority population thereby diluting their voting strength. What is important is not how a district looks, but whether those who live in it can combine for effective political activity.

As one lower court has put it, a district is sufficiently compact if it allows for “effective representation.” A district would fail this test of compactness if it provided no sense of community, or if its members and its representative could not effectively and efficiently communicate with each other, or if it were difficult to tell who actually lived in the district. Applying this standard, and based upon accepted notions of federalism, a court would be required to defer to the legislature’s choice in district configuration and set it aside only upon proof that the choice violated the norm of “effective representation,” and not simply because the shape of the district was aesthetically unappealing.

The continuing claim that majority minority districts are political apartheid and exacerbate racial bloc voting has no real basis in fact. There is no more credible evidence to support the claim today than there was when it was rejected by Congress more than ten years ago. Indeed, the evidence strongly suggests that the creation of majority minority districts, and the election of highly regarded individuals such as John Lewis and Mike Espy, tend in the long term to decrease racial bloc voting and polarization. Certainly that is the underlying assumption of remedial redistricting. It is designed to break down the barriers of race and allow minority voters to participate on an equal basis in the process of self governance.

Nor are majority minority districts “ghettos” likely to elect persons representing only members of their own race. The 12th congressional district in North Carolina, for example, is in fact less segregated, i.e. predominantly of one race, than any congressional district previously drawn in the state. The district is about 57 percent black and 43 percent white. To suggest that such a district is segregated or is a ghetto, but that one in which the racial percentages were reversed is integrated, tortures language and logic. Political apartheid more accurately describes the systems that existed in states such as North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, where all the congressional districts were majority white and no blacks in modern times had ever been elected to Congress.

We do not live in a world that is color blind. Racial bloc voting remains a fact of political life in many jurisdictions. Where it exists and is shown to dilute minority voting strength, majority minority districts are a proven and effective remedy.

Laughlin McDonald is the director of the American Civil Liberties Union Southern Regional Office, which specializes in voting rights cases.

Lillian Smith:
Poet Among Demagogues
By Margaret Rose Gladney

Vol. 15, No. 3, 1993, pp. 8-9

Internationally acclaimed as author of the controversial novel, Strange Fruit (1944), Lillian Smith was the most liberal and outspoken of white mid-twentieth century Southern writers on issues of social, and especially racial, justice. Her writing explored the interrelatedness of her culture’s attitudes towards race and sexuality and the ways in which the South’s economic, political, and religious institutions perpetuated a dehumanizing existence for all its people. When other Southern liberals such as Ralph McGill, Hodding Carter, Virginius Dabney, and Jonathan Daniels were charting a cautious course on racial change, Smith boldly and persistently called for an end to segregation. For such boldness she was often scorned by more moderate Southerners, threatened by arsonists, and denied the critical attention she deserved as a writer. Yet she continued to write and speak for improved human relations and social justice throughout her life.

Smith refused to separate the seemingly conflicting roles of artist and activist. Calling the Supreme Court’s ruling on school desegregation “every child’s Magna Carta,” she wrote Now is the Time (1955) to urge compliance with both the letter and spirit of that law. Although she rarely identified herself with any organization, Smith was deeply respected and sought after by those who actively worked for justice in the South. She played a major role in supporting, advising, and criticizing the work of such national and regional organizations as the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Congress of Racial Equality, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Southern Regional Council. One of the most insightful portrayals of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s, Smith’s last published book, Our Faces, Our Words (1964), reveals her personal knowledge and experience with the young civil rights activists.

Born December 12, 1897, the eighth of ten children, Lillian Smith grew up in Jasper, Florida, where her father was a prominent business and civic leader. Some of the richness of that childhood is beautifully told in Memory of a Large Christmas (1962). The more conflicting aspects, “the hard lessons dealing with sin, sex, and segregation,” form the basis of her most perceptive critique of Southern culture, Killers of the Dream (1949, revised 1961).

Smith’s life as a daughter of upper-class whites in the small-town Deep South ended rather abruptly when her father lost his turpentine mills in 1915 and moved the family to their summer home in the mountains of Clayton, Georgia. Financially on her own, Smith attended nearby Piedmont College one year, helped her parents manage a hotel, and taught in two mountain schools before she was able to pursue her chosen career in music at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. In 1922 she accepted a three-year position as director of music at a Methodist school for girls in Huchow, China. But her ambitions for a career in music ended when her parents, in ill health, asked her to return to direct the summer camp for girls begun by her father in 1920.

Under her direction from 1925 through 1948, Laurel Falls Camp became an outstanding innovative educational institution, known for its instruction in the arts, music, dramatics, and modern psychology. At least part of her intent was, as she wrote one camper’s mother, “to wake up the little sleeping beauties that our Anglo-American culture has anesthetized, or rather put in a deep freeze.” Encouraging emotional and psychological as well as physical development, Smith helped the daughters of white upper-class southerners question the world they lived in and begin to envision the possibility of change in that world. The camp was also a laboratory for many of the ideas informing Smith’s analysis of Southern culture,

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especially her understanding of the effects of childrearing practices on adult racial and sexual relationships.

Through the camp Smith also met Paula Snelling, a native of Pinehurst, Georgia, and began the life-long relationship that encouraged and sustained her writing career. As intellectuals, keenly interested in the political and literary ferment that began in the South in the 1920s, Smith and Snelling entered the public arena as writers in opposition to the Agrarians with the publication of a small literary magazine, Pseudopodia (later changed to North Georgia Review and finally South Today), which they co-edited from 1936 to 1945. Publishing and reviewing the literary work and opinions of both black and white women and men, their magazine addressed a wide range of political, social, and economic issues and quickly achieved acclaim as a forum for liberal ideas in the region.

An equally far-reaching and perceptive analysis of the South informs Smith’s record-breaking best-seller, Strange Fruit. Set in the post-World War I South of her youth, the love story between a black woman and a white man—banned for obscenity in Boston—was translated into fifteen languages and produced as a Broadway play. But Killers of the Dream, an even more insightful exploration of the inter-relationship of racism and sexism in Southern society, brought strong criticism from fellow Southerners and the beginning of Smith’s isolation from the mainstream of American letters. Writing confessionally and autobiographically, frequently from the perspective of women and children, about racial and sexual fears in American culture, neither her style nor her subject matter was acceptable to the literary establishment and the general public of Cold War America. Thus, although Smith received national and international acclaim for her courageous fight against segregation, none of her subsequent books achieved the popularity or financial success of her first novel.

Her more philosophical works, The Journey (1954) and One Hour (1959), demonstrate the extent to which Smith’s concerns extended beyond race relations in the American South to include all aspects of human relationships in the postmodern world. In The Journey she wrote, “I went in search for an image of the human being I could be proud of.” Through this moving spiritual autobiography she found the true measure of the human spirit to be the individual’s creative response to ordeal. After two young white boys set fire to her home in November 1955, destroying her personal belongings, thousands of valuable letters, and unpublished manuscripts, Smith wrote One Hour. Addressing her own questions about why her ideas about social change and human relationships were so strongly resisted, in One Hour Smith explored the relationship between what she called “mob thinking and mob acting.” The novel brilliantly depicts the destructive effects of mass hysteria and censorship associated with the McCarthy era while probing the dynamics of personal relationships of white upper-middle-class intellectuals, especially the power of their unacknowledged fears concerning taboo sexual relationships.

While challenging the fundamental assumptions of her culture, Lillian Smith chose to remain in her north Georgia mountain home to write her books and live her life. After thirteen years of battling cancer, she was buried there, among the remains of Laurel Falls Camp, in September 1966. Since her death three additional volumes of her work have been published: From the Mountain (1972), selected articles from her magazine; The Winner Names the Age (1978), a collection of her speeches and essays; and How Am I to Be Heard? Letters of Lillian Smith (1993).

Margaret Rose Gladney is a professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama.

A Letter from Lillian Smith to Gerda Lerner

By Lillian Smith

Vol. 15, No. 3, 1993, pp. 10-11, 14

Today Gerda Lerner is celebrated as a pioneer in women’s history and a leading scholar in U. S. history. Before she began her academic career in the mid-1960s, however, she had published several short stories and a novel, a story, about her adolescence in Vienna, Austria, of 1934-38, and she was struggling to find a publisher for her second novel.

Lerner first wrote Lillian Smith after reading Smith’s December 24, 1960 Saturday Review essay, “Novelists Need a Commitment. “While expressing her appreciation for Smith’s writing, Lerner wrote that her personal experience as a writer indicated that more than a commitment was necessary to get her work published. She described her second novel, which she had been told was out of tune with the literary market, as being in keeping with Smith’s concepts of dehumanization and fragmentation in human relationships. Feeling blocked as a writer and in need of affirmation, she asked Smith if she would read the manuscript.

Smith’s response not only documents one of the many instances of her willingness to help younger writers; it also provides an excellent example of her understanding of the relationship of the artist to the world in which she lives. Significantly, just as her support of political activists included challenging their understanding of the process of working for social change, so her support for other writers included both networking effort and theoretical discussions about writing and the creative process. Such reflective discussion as is contained in this letter illustrates clearly why Smith refused to separate her work as artist and citizen and why theory and practice, art and politics are consistently interrelated in her life.—Margaret Rose Gladney

Sunday [January] 22, 1961

Dear Gerda Lerner:

I was deeply moved by your letter. Warmed by your appreciation; hurt by the sudden glimpse you gave me of your own frustration; troubled and brightened, shocked and encouraged by vistas your words opened up. I am going to answer now, for fear that things, THINGS THINGS will keep me from doing so, later.

This sharp edged, cutting, upthrusting age we are living in makes inhuman demands on human beings. I think this about my own life. I am by nature shy, quiet, withdrawn; every move I have made in my life toward people, toward relating myself to my external world has hurt behind it; something pushes; sometimes, my conscience, my awareness of the hurt of others; sometimes, my own blazing rebellion against the false, the hypocritical; sometimes, my simple, almost childlike curiosity

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about people, things, customs, defenses—I want to read, to brood, to study, to think. I want simply to look. Just look. At mountains. At a face. At a painting. I want to listen to the music that was the only real joy I had for the first twenty-two years of my life. I was absorbed in it, covered by it, hidden in it, exalted by it, excited—All my life was involved in music, except my two sharp eyes that kept staring at people. Then, in my own life, things happened; parents crumpled with psychic burdens and financial ones; I had to come out of myself and help them, take over. This call on me from them gradually spread and became a call[,] a silent call from the South on me for my help. Only the poor South did not know it needed me. I felt it did. Not southern people. And so, a conflict began which has never for one year let up: the conflict between my deep desires, my instinctual needs, my hunger to create something, to make a thing—and this crying, pleading but even now silent cry of my people, Come over to Macedonia and help us. The tragic knowledge that they have not known they were crying for help and resented the help I have tried to give is one of the wounds of human life.

What I mean when I say an artist, a writer must have a sense of commitment (by the way that title was not mine, but the Saturday Review’s: my title was more accurate: Out of Creative Tension Comes Peace. They subtly altered my real meaning by that title which they used without my permission.) is that the artist must have a sense of vocation, a sense of being “called” to his work; it is something he must do; he must listen when he is told to “make a new thing.” This is what I meant, truly. This is my belief. But since this artist lives in a world of people a world of surging life, ambivalent life, aching, passionately hurting life, he must make his “thing” his “new thing” out of this life, out of his own personal experience of life. Because my experience of life has to do with chasms and walls, with “a trembling earth” which literally was true since the earth near the Great Swamp of my childhood does actually tremble when one walks on it—because my experience was in the actual living a kind of metaphor of the white race, of all his grandeurs and all its errors; because I also lived with Negroes, close to them, not as problems but as people, because I saw the cruelties, felt them abrade me as well as my Negro friends, I could write of nothing else. How could I! I had to explore the meanings of the trembling earth beneath my feet: the philosophical and ethical meanings, the psychological meanings, yes—the esthetic meanings too. I have always looked at racial segregation as something that has spelled out a doom for white people that black people may escape. I have always seen our human dilemmas from the point of view of the corroding effect of arrogance and hate, of moral blindness and intellectual obscurantism rather than from the point of view, “Let’s help the poor Negro.” The Negro has had a hellish time: he has been bound outwardly by many bonds, but the white man has bound his soul and mind and heart until they are abject slaves to this sick worship called White Supremacy. Always, I have looked at things this way.

As for problems: There is neither a white nor Negro problem. There is no racial problem; no “problem” of racial relations. These matters are not simple, sharpedged problems which can be solved. The only thing that can happen is for us to “make a new thing,” to do, as does God the artist “create the new.” We abandon human dilemmas, we never solve them. And that is why I say even the young writer (although I did not say this in the Sat.

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Review

article) must have a commitment: a commitment to make something new of the life around him. But does he see this life? I don’t think Faulkner, for instance, really sees the life around him or even inside him. He has made something new, something interesting; but nothing great, nothing that can find its place in the future of mankind. As I said of him, twenty-five years ago, he is truly a great finger painter. That was the term I used then; today, I’d say, Faulkner has tried to do with words (but has not succeeded because words have set meanings) what Pollock and de Kooning have tried to do with the drip method. With him, not quite abstraction for words are symbols not abstractions and he cannot make pure abstraction out of them. But he has used a method something like theirs. But there is a fallacy here: The writer and the painter are not in the same creative category; they can never be equated with each other. Not even the poet can be equated with the painter. The painter is much closer to music and when he tries to achieve pure abstraction as music does often achieve, then he is on solid ground. But the writer can never do this. He cannot take a word and drain all its old meaning from it, mash it into pulp and make “something new out of it.” He can try as Joyce tried but he cannot do it. The word is there. In the beginning was the Word. It has meaning; it has ten thousand layers of meaning, maybe; but meaning which human beings know is there; and so you cannot begin as if you were God and make the material, too, with which you work. Your subject matter can be personally yours, and should be. If it also happens to affect the whole world as my material does, then that is both good and bad. Good because it is important. Your treatment of it may not be; but the subject matter is important. It is “bad” for the writer because readers are always reading into your words and your subject matter what they want to see there; or what they fear to see there. You cannot get esthetic distance from subject matter that involves “race” for instance. When Melville wrote Moby Dick, no one read him; reviewers sneered at the book. Why? Because whale hunting was an actual business at that time; they couldn’t get esthetic distance. They felt he was dealing with a “problem” although actually he was not as every reader today knows. But then, it seemed so; and only Hawthorne grasped his real intent. But never said so publicly. Only privately to Melville.

As a citizen, I have sometimes used my writing talent my talent for finding a simple way to say something that is hideously twisted and complex, to help view a fragment of “race relations” more clearly. I have even suggested, as a housewife might during a thunderstorm, that there are ways to shut windows, and doors, and put pans under the bad leaks; and call the children in out of reach of lightning, etc. But as a serious writer, as I think of myself in Strange Fruit (yes, even that first book) and Journey and Killers of the Dream and One Hour, I have always tried to make something new out of what was before hackneyed, trite, and false; I have always tried to show invisible things (in this sense, I am a realist. I do like to dredge up what even my own eyes have never seen before). I have tried. I do not think I have quite succeeded in making a new, wondrous, shining thing out of the big Nightmare. And I want to do this. I want to do as Auden and poets before him have said, “teach my terrors to sing.” When I do this maybe I can take a nasty, obscene, hating, panting monstrosity and show it in a way that even it, even it, takes on some of the luminous quality of first creation.

I am sorry that your books have been lost in the awful, crazy shuffle of our times. Yes, I’d like to read your book. Our reviewers and critics are to blame. They are men lost in the present; talking of nihilism as if they had discovered it. It would make us laugh, except it is no laughing matter for serious writers. They now talk of “total rejection”—and one moans, Oh God. Dostoevski did all this 80 years ago and did it so well, always setting the nihilism cleanly against the great shadowy Affirmation. But they have nothing to affirm. Why? Because these critics and reviewers do not see the actual life we are living. They see what the 19th century saw; they see even what was seen up to 1940; but they don’t really see the invisible things. This kind of realism is the realm of the creative writer: to show the invisible things actually present in contemporary life. This is one duty; one that we can commit ourselves to. Then we have another duty, another commitment to make. And that is to show it reflected against the future; and the past. Then we have a third commitment: to show these visible and invisible things as they look to each of us, in the dim depths of our own heart and mind, as they link on to what they find there. This is art as the writer deals with it. Art as the composer deals with it is something different; art as the painter and sculptor deals with it is different, too. And the painter’s art is clearly different from that of the sculptor. Actually, writer and sculptor are closer together in their needs, their materials, their actual results.

Thank you for writing me. And thank you for letting me write you.

This letter is in How Am I to Be Heard? Letters of Lillian Smith, edited by Margaret Rose Gladney and published in September by University of North Carolina Press. The letter is from the Smith collection at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia.

A Life in Letters

Reviewed by John Egerton

Vol. 15, No. 3, 1993, pp. 15-16

How Am I to be Heard? Letters of Lillian Smith, edited by Margaret Rose Gladney (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1993, 384 pages).

One of the most striking—and consequential—changes in the modern culture of the South and the Nation is the demise of letter-writing. Just fifty years ago, it was the principal means of long-distance communication; now the telephone, the fax, audio and video recorders—and, strangely, what appears to be a declining interest in communicating at all—have made lengthy and informative letters a curiosity, if not an artifact.

Too bad for us all, not only now but later. For one thing, it’s going to mean that when someone like Margaret Rose Gladney comes along to gather up the correspondence of a fascinating and influential figure long since departed, there’s not going to be much to go on—certainly nothing like the abundant wealth of letters written by Lillian Smith, who was without a doubt one of the most fascinating if not influential figures of the mid-century South.

The bare outline of Smith’s seven decades as a Southerner is intriguing enough in itself. Born and raised in an upper-class merchant-farmer family in Florida and the north Georgia mountains (their summer home), she aspired to a career as a pianist and received some conservatory training. But a more conventional life as a teacher pulled her away, and after a brief teaching experience at a Methodist mission school in China, she returned to the home near Clayton, Georgia, where her parents had moved permanently to operate their summer camp for girls. By 1930, after her father had died, Smith became the owner and manager of the camp—and she began, at about the same time, to express her thoughts and feelings on paper.

She also had entered by then into a personal relationship with Paula Snelling, a part-time counselor at the camp and a teacher the rest of the time at a school in Macon. For all of four decades, Smith and Snelling maintained a stable and intimate partnership that both they and their family and friends tacitly acknowledged as a de facto same-sex marriage. They founded a literary magazine in 1936 that changed names twice (the last being South Today), grew to a circulation of ten thousand, and lasted until the mid-1940s. They also ran Laurel Falls Camp, a substantial enterprise, until 1948. Smith in the meantime wrote two books that brought her a measure of both fame and notoriety: Strange Fruit, a 1944 novel about a love affair between a white man and a black woman in the South, and Killers of the Dream, a nonfiction work of Southern social criticism, largely autobiographical and confessional, published in 1949.

From the time of her emergence as an observer and essayist on the ills of Southern culture in the late 1930s until her death in 1966, Lillian Smith wrote about white-black and male-female relationships in the South with a depth of insight and candor that few others could equal, then or since. When I first encountered Killers of the Dream in the 1960s, at least fifteen years after its publication, it had an immediacy and a degree of revelation that struck me as powerfully as if it had just been written. I still think of it as one of the most meaningful books about the South that I have ever read.

At times, her books and articles betrayed a tone of preachiness, of lecturing if not scolding. That was probably inevitable and unavoidable; she was an idealist, an outspoken liberal activist, and she had deep feelings about the wrongs that privileged Southern whites had inflicted upon their brothers and sisters of another color or class. She yearned to “understand everybody,” to explain their behavior. Few people have ever studied the sickness of racism as deeply as she did. If she sometimes sounded a bit pedantic, perhaps it was because she knew what she was talking about

But her letters were also an integral part of her effort to influence others—to inform, to persuade, to incite—and reading them now is more engaging and stimulating to me than, say, re-reading Killers of the Dream or Strange Fruit. As she did in her personal encounters, which were numerous and varied, Smith showed in her letters another side of herself: informal, responsive, collegial, warm and witty. She clearly had a way with words—and when she focused her verbal energies on one listener, one reader, she was at her best as a writer.

Rose Gladney skillfully displays all of those Smithian attributes in these pages, not only in the letters she has chosen to use but in her own amplifying notes and commentaries that put the letters into context. Gladney, who teaches American Studies at the University of Alabama, began her work with the Smith correspondence fifteen years ago. More than mere compilation informs the finished product; Gladney shows an understanding of Lillian Smith and her times that is as thorough as it is open and

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honest.

These letters reinforce and expand the image of Smith that emerges from a reading of her books. She practiced, in race relations, precisely what she preached: a comprehensive sharing of life with others on the planet as equals, and an understanding of integration as the achievement of unity and wholeness, whether among individuals or within a community or a society. She didn’t retreat into silence or equivocate or mince words when she talked or wrote about the great ideas that energized her—race in particular. The anonymous threats and the real acts of violence aimed at her (arson most especially) did sometimes terrify her, but she gave no public hint of her fear.

What she dreaded more than men with torches was the feeling of being dismissed as “just a nice woman helping Negroes,” not a serious writer with creative talent. The “little humiliations” were the worst. In her never-ending battles with white moderates and liberals-men, usually—she seemed unable to get on equal footing. Ralph McGill and Hodding Carter in particular drove her to distraction with their cutting remarks. “Why can’t I be heard?” she demanded to know. No answer she ever got put her mind at ease.

But history has a way of evening things. Before World War II had ended, Lillian Smith had taken “a firm and public stand in opposition to segregation”—this in declining an invitation to join the board of the newly-formed Southern Regional Council, which would not take such a stand until 1951. McGill and Carter, on the other hand, would not come around to her point of view—and history’s—until after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954.

There can be little doubt that she got less recognition than she deserved while she was living. But as her letters and Rose Gladney’s supporting text make clear, Smith got the ultimate and decisive nod: She was right.

Nashville author and Lillian Smith Award winner John Egerton’s newest book about the South, to be published by Knopf in 1994, covers much of the period during which Lillian Smith wrote, the years from Roosevelt through Brown.

Dogpatch, USA: The Road to Hokum

By Rodger Brown

Vol. 15, No. 3, 1993, pp. 18-26

In May of 1968 cartoonist Al Capp motored into the Ozarks of north Arkansas smoking custom-rolled cigarettes, wearing dark glasses and a tailored English suit, and glibly dissembling for a pack of reporters. Capp’s trip to the Ozarks was national news. Dogpatch USA, the first theme park based on his wildly successful comic strip Li’l Abner, was finally open for the tourist trade. The Lt. Governor was there. Miss Arkansas was there. With the snip of a ribbon and a slug of Kickapoo Joy Juice, Al Capp declared Dogpatch finally “real,” and began welcoming the first of an expected torrent of tourists.

The boom was even bigger than anticipated. “Tourists here in Droves; ‘No Vacancy’ signs go up,” the Harrison Daily Times declared. Local motel owners held a “council of war” to find a way to accommodate the tourists who were flocking into the rugged landscape of The Dogpatch Zone at a rate of five thousand a day, coming to see blacksmiths, beekeepers, shinglemakers, and the surreal hillbillies of Al Capp’s world famous comic strip come to life. What most of the visitors didn’t fully realize, however, was that they were participating in a moment rich with a sort of postmodern poetics which has since become commonplace: The Arkansas syndicate that built Dogpatch USA was peddling colonial stereotypes as family entertainment, and at the core of the park’s attraction was a complex melody conjured by the dueling banjos of simulation and authenticity.

Today, Dogpatch USA’s place in American cultural history has been forgotten. A year or two ago I heard there was a theme park based on the Li’l Abner comic strip where area residents dress up like Capp’s hillbilly burlesques. With an Arkansan now sitting in the White House and hillbilly motifs being revived in editorial cartoons, I began to wonder why the park hadn’t gotten more attention than the few dismissive mentions in Ozark guidebooks. I made some calls, got directions, and at the opening of tourist season this summer I went to visit.

“Nearly everything is going wrong,” said Shirley Cooper, Dogpatch USA’s general manager. Shirley is from the nearby town of Deer. She used to sell her quilts at Dogpatch. Then park employees began to leave and Shirley was asked to fill in and help with an inventory control system. Then she was made director of accounting. Then director of personnel. Now, after a financial crisis and a crippling exodus by long-time staff, Shirley runs the place.

It was mid-May. Dogpatch was opening two weeks late, and the delay had sparked pessimistic scuttlebutt up and down Arkansas’ Scenic Highway 7, along which Dogpatch is located. From 140, north to 76 Country Boulevard in Branson, and across the Ozark Mountain Country from Booger Hollow Trading Post to the seven-story statue of

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Christ at Eureka Springs, the rumors had been rampant in the tourism industry that finally, after all these years, Dogpatch USA is roadkill.

“I don’t know why, but every year there’s rumors that the park’s not going to open,” she said.”They say it’s gone bankrupt or Dolly Parton bought it, or Johnny Cash bought it. But none of it’s true. And this year, everyone was sure this was it because we’re behind schedule. But we’re still here.”

Dogpatch USA is a classic American roadside attraction. It’s a basket of cornpone and hillbilly hokum in a beautiful Ozark mountain setting. Nearby is a waterfall, limestone caverns, and a spring that flows clear and steadily into a creek that has powered a gristmill for more than 150 years. There are rides and gift shops, and at the heart of the park is a trout farm where visitors can catch and cook rainbow trout, “the gamest of all inland fish.” The decor is bumpkin kitsch. The faux-illiterate signs along Dogpatch’s macadam footpaths read like a Po’ Folks menu: “Onbelievablee delishus Fish Vittles Kooked fo’ Sail.”

Dogpatch opened in 1968, but its history, in a generous sense, begins about a hundred years earlier. The daisy chain of alluded identities springs from the work of post-Civil War local color writers, weaves through the tumultuous and calamitous periods of industrialization and colonization of the Appalachians, the displacement of mountain populations to the cities, and cataracts up over the turn of the century when, in 1900, the word “hillbilly” first appeared in print, toting on its wiry back a croker sack full of iconography—squirrel rifles, corn cob pipes, floppy felt hats, feuds, a degraded language, and depraved life—stock sufficient to justify the plunder. Out of this crashing surf where industry and the marketplace met the mountains, Li’l Abner was born.

Capp’s creations linked him permanently to the history of the Southern mountains, even though his only experience in the South before creating his cartoon was limited to a hitchhiking trip to Memphis when he was fifteen. Born in New Haven, Connecticut to Latvian parents, Capp had lived his entire life in Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania. Instead of being grounded in experience or research, Capp’s hillbillies came from the public cultural archive. Li’l Abner was inspired, Capp’s wife Catherine once said, by a hillbilly band they saw in Manhattan.

Li’l Abner was the first comic strip to star mountaineers as main characters, but Capp’s hillbilly compote was certainly not unique. His versions of hillbillies were consolidated forms drawn from a widespread tradition of mountaineer caricatures: there’s the voluptuous rag-clad ‘tater sack sexkitten; the grizzled corn-cob pipe smoking visionary crone matriarch; the lay-about ineffectual pappy; and the clodhopping oblivious proto-Jethro Li’l Abner, the all-American country boy—part Alvin York and Abe Lincoln, a little Sambo in whiteface, and Paul Bunyan with a drawl.

Li’l Abner first appeared in 1934, two years after the publication of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, and within a few years the cartoon was a contender with Dick Tracy, Blondie and Little Orphan Annie, as America’s number one comic strip. In the mid-1940s, the United Feature Syndicate reckoned that Capp had 27 million readers. The U.S. population at the time was only about 140 million. By the late 1940s, Capp was something of a hero to intellectuals and artists. Capp’s writing had been compared to Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Dickens, Dostoevski and Rabelais, and his artwork was compared to Hogarth and Daumier. John Steinbeck said Al Capp deserved the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1951, Marshall McLuhan

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wrote in The Mechanical Bride that “[Capp’s] keen eye for political, commercial, and social humbug is the result of a critical intelligence which is notably lacking at the more respected levels of writing . . . . The criticism which is embedded in his highly parabolic entertainment therefore, has a complexity which is the mark of vision [Cited in Asa Berger, Lil Abner: A Study in American Satire. Twayne Publishers, Inc.; New York. p. 167.].

Al Capp definitely had a vision, but it was a twisted one. “All comedy,” Capp once said, “is based on man’s delight in man’s inhumanity to man. I know that is so, because I have made forty million people laugh more or less every day for sixteen years, and this has been the basis of all the comedy I have created. I think it is the basis of all comedy.”

For the first decade and a half of Li’l Abner’s existence, Capp was rarely aggressively political; instead, his satire was of the order of high-powered social spoofing. Capp, who grew up poor, set up a productive formula for a seemingly endless series of quasi-class comedies by pitting his Dogpatchers, whom he called his “family of innocents,” against the businesspeople, gangsters and high society bourgeoisie of urban, capitalist America. Politicians were lampooned through blowhards like Senator Jack S. Phogbound (“Good old Jack S.”), and businessmen were mocked through characters like the piggish J. Roaringham Fatback, whose achievements were listed in Who’s Who in American Pork. Capp was antagonistic to cityfolk, but Capp’s agrarian rustics fared no better. Capp’s characters occasionally expressed utopian longings for happiness and peace, but, ultimately, their desires went unfulfilled, nobody was redeemed. Capp’s nihilism, his pessimistic realpolitik, never provided any answers. His world had no stable center; both oppressors and the victims of oppression were equally degraded.

In addition to his more pointed social satire, Capp

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was also a ribald, lascivious, one-man carnival society. Puns and sexual allusions showed up consistently in the strip. Li’l Abner was full of jugs and shithouses and boners and melons, enough phallic shadows and labial knotholes to earn him a condemning eight pages in the report from a 1951 New York State Joint Legislative committee investigating the comics, and an expose in Confidential magazine: “Al Capp Exposed: The Secret Sex life of Li’l Abner.”

Capp’s social satire through the 1940s and early 1950s was considered a bracing corrective to the bourgeois domesticism and the Bam-Zowie! action strips that dominated the comic pages. In the late 1940s, Capp was branded a radical after he introduced shmoos, little blobular creatures that willingly, gleefully, sacrificed themselves for the good of humanity, solving all the problems of want and need which, in Capp’s view, are the root causes of war and social injustice. The shmoos, weirdly, helped solidify Capp’s public image as a liberal: “[A]ll the McCarthyites were down on me,” Capp explained to The New Yorker, in 1963. “Shmoos were Socialistic, they said. Shmoos were a blatant and treacherous attack on capitalism.”

Capp’s image as a liberal survived until the 1960s, even though he succumbed to the pressure of McCarthyite conformity, killed off the shmoos and married off Li’l Abner to Daisy Mae. Capp revived the shmoos in 1963, but in his comments to the New Yorker, he revealed the lack of purposeful commitment in his once-iconoclastic strip: “McCarthy was coming to power when I created shmoos, and those were inconceivably terrible times. They got worse and worse, until eventually the only satire possible and permissible in this democracy of ours was broad, weak domestic comedy. That’s why I married off Li’l Abner and began to concentrate on him again. I was absolutely sure that to keep on with political satire-with things like shmoos-would be to commit suicide, and I asked myself, seriously, ‘Al, what use would you be dead?’ I really believe that it’s the duty of the satirist to stay alive—to duck—until it’s safe to come out and possible to be useful again. Society’s finally free for satire now, and that’s one reason I brought back shmoos. At present, shmoos can reasonably occur. [“The Shmoo’s Return,” The New Yorker. October 26, 1963.]

In the 1960s, as he said, Capp returned to pointed satire. By that time, however, the world was a different place and instead of using the revived shmoos to satirize American affluence, he used them to criticize what he called “this insane business of foreign aid we’re in—this nonsense of give, give, give, with no strings attached.”

THE CLOSEST THING to an official history of Dogpatch USA is a gigantic scrapbook the size of an interstate exit sign which Shirley Cooper hauled out from behind some overstuffed file cabinets. The scrapbook’s brown leatherette cover was embossed with small gold letters “DOGPATCH USA.” The huge codex swelled with newspaper articles, brochures and telegrams—the public history of the park—meticulously collected, clipped and pasted into the book by the founders of Dogpatch from the first public announcement of their intentions in 1967.

“‘Dogpatch USA’ Slated for Marble Falls Area,” the headline read in the Harrison Daily Times on January 3, 1967. Al Capp ‘Excited.'” “Dogpatch Leads Way for Big Boost To Prosperity of Harrison Region.” The clippings were faded and yellowed relics of a long-dead enthusiasm. Outside Shirley Cooper’s office, the Dogpatch of 1993 was a ragged remnant of its original state: long gone are the surrey rides, the live bear acts, the celebrity visits. But the story told by the scrapbook was of another world, one where Nehru jackets were the edge, the U.S. was rushing troops to South Vietnam, Newton County was the poorest county in Arkansas, the second poorest in the nation, and Li’l Abner Yokum was coming to the rescue.

The idea to build a theme park based on the “Li’l Abner” cartoon came from a couple of Harrison businessmen. One, Jim Schermerhorn, owned a burglar alarm company and was a fanatical spelunker. The other, O.J. Snow, was a real estate appraiser, salesman and developer who had flown B-17 bombers as a pilot with the 91st Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force during World War

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II, who, since the war, had built nearly 300 homes and businesses. The men’s inspiration to build a tourist attraction in the Ozarks did not just pop into their heads uninvited. They had watched as the Corps of Engineers in the late 1950s dammed the wild White River forming Table Rock Lake just across the state line in southern Missouri. They had seen the crowds attracted to the nearby outdoor drama Shepherd of the Hills, based on Harold Bell Wright’s turn-of-the-century inspirational novel. They’d seen the increasing numbers of fishermen and their families driving into the country. And since 1960, they’d watched a woman named Mary Herschend and her sons, Jack and Peter, turn some clapboard storefronts and a limestone sinkhole called Marvel Cave into a successful tourist attraction: a simulacrum of a nineteenth century mining town called Silver Dollar City.

Snow became the first president of Recreation Enterprises. The group included men involved in a wide range of businesses: asphalt, construction, residential development, timber, cattle and banking. Most of the investors had families that went back at least one generation in Harrison. A few others were from Oklahoma or Kansas, but had lived for many years in the area.

When Snow”s group petitioned Capp in 1966 for permission to use his comic as the park’s theme, they got lucky. Capp was in the mood to sell. Just the year before, after being asked for years by beverage makers to let them use the name Kickapoo Joy Juice, Capp had finally cut a deal with the National NuGrape Co. of Atlanta. (A couple years earlier, Pepsi had come out with its hillbilly soft drink, Mountain Dew.) After licensing Kickapoo Joy Juice, Capp then accepted Snow’s proposal, again after years of resisting offers by other theme park developers.

Although Dogpatch was originally located in Kentucky, Capp was willing to dissemble for a percentage of the gross. The Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock declared after the park’s announcement: “Ozarks of Arkansas Fit Al Capp’s Dogpatch Image.” The writer said, “Capp has never told the exact location of Dogpatch, the comic strip hillbilly community that is just a notch below a garbage heap and which could be in any backwoods mountain region. But he told newsmen during the weekend that he had once traveled through the Ozarks and this was ‘just about the section that I imagined.'”

Not everybody was as delighted as Snow and his partners with Al Capp’s imagined region. Arkansas had long suffered under the pens of yankee scribes, and a theme park populated by make-believe barefoot hillbilly morons was not entirely welcome. The day after Snow made his announcement, two officials with Arkansas’ Publicity and Parks Commission protested that Dogpatch USA would undermine the image of the state. They said the state would gain more from a project more like the Ozark Folk Center which had then just recently received a million dollar federal grant. The two officials said they thought a display of “indigenous folkways and crafts” might better serve to increase long-term tourist interest and create a more favorable image to attract investment.

The news of Dogpatch USA also inspired an angry and insightful response from a Gazette reader in Little Rock. “Perhaps this will draw many tourists to the state; but it will create a poor image of the state and especially the pioneer—the so called Arkansas hillbilly. This same hillbilly is our ancestor who built a state out of a wilderness. Mr. Snow’s project will make Arkansas the laughing stock of the nation. Is this the kind of publicity we want?

“It has taken almost 100 years for the state to ‘live down’ the image created by ‘Three Years in Arkansas’ and ‘A Slow Train Through Arkansas;’ then came Bob Burns with Grandpa Snazzy to bring back the bewhiskered, barefoot, tobacco-chewing, ignorant hillbilly. To further clinch the idea, came the Little Rock Central High School episode of 1957. Now, we have a group of business men who wish to keep this image before the public. Why?

“Where did the Arkansas hillbilly originate? In the mind of a ‘back east’ writer who knew even less about the natives of Arkansas than this writer knows about the inhabitants of Mars … These ignorant hillbillies left us the heritage of integrity, independence and pride. Do we want to trade it for a mess of pottage?”

The answer, obviously, was “yes.”

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Soon after that letter appeared, a Daily Times editorial declared: “The “Li’l Abner comic by Al Capp has been popular over the years, and I think Arkansas would advance its image as a state which can spoof its own foibles by adding a Dogpatch USA.” Another editorial in the Harrison daily declared: “Dogpatch is going to draw people like honey draws bears and these people will have money to spend. Let’s get them to spend it here!” Still another editorial voice in The Fort Smith Southwest American sided with Dogpatch. “…we think the fears probably are groundless … [W] e don’t think there’s much—if any—danger that the state’s image will suffer as a result of that sole undertaking.”

Al Capp did what he could to finesse the controversy. During one visit to the area when Dogpatch was being built he said, “I’m so glad I never saw all you attractive people before I drew you. All I knew about the Ozarks was what I’d seen in movies made by people who’d never seen anything but Hollywood …. The Ozarks, where the girls are so pretty and the men can speak so well! Dogpatch USA seems to combine the old rustic flavor with the best kind of plumbing and windows that let the sun in.”

In The Informer and Newton County Times, published in the county seat of Jasper, a writer said Dogpatch was the best thing to happen to that part of Arkansas. “It will be a shame if this county doesn’t prepare itself for the untold millions of people who will be coming to visit Dogpatch. Many a fortune can and will be made over a span of a few years by serving the visitor to Dogpatch. It is going to be the ‘fun place’ of the South for sure. To coin a hippie phrase, Dogpatch is going to be a ‘happening.'”

Indeed. And what was happening was an effort by monied interests in Harrison and Little Rock to take advantage of the poverty and beauty of the region in a gesture of bold cultural politics, taking a set of nationally known hillbilly stereotypes, building a real fantasy hillbilly comic strip village, then charging admission, thereby contributing significantly to a fate predicted in a letter to the Gazette by a woman from Eureka Springs, and fulfilled in the recent spate of hillbilly editorial cartoons aimed at Bill Clinton. The woman despaired: “Is Arkansas doomed to be a caricature state—a Dogpatch state?”

The boomers of Dogpatch represented their project as harmless tourism, doing nothing but good. But tourism is not so harmless. Tourism isn’t simply entertainment a way to spend idle hours and extra cash. The tourist “attractions” are part of a dynamic of cultural iconography. Tourism offers a means by which people

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can assess their world and define their own sense of identity. The ways of the tourist are also the ways of the postmodernist; for both, time has accelerated and space has compressed, making nearly all points on the globe and in history accessible, variable, available to mix and match on an itinerary to suit your taste. The unstable and contingent character of reality in the tourist aesthetic was quickly recognized by the people in the area around Dogpatch USA when it was first being built in 1967-68. A vernacular deconstruction was carried out in the pages of the small town newspapers. The local debate was filled with discussion of the issues of simulation and authenticity.

Just before Dogpatch opened, the Harrison Daily Times reported on construction progress and puzzled over the theme park’s weird identity, using a convoluted logic and lay-lit-crit vocabulary: “The layout of the town is a new idea and is completely original. Al Capp has never before drawn the entire town. The stage settings for the musical comedy and motion picture Li’l Abner, were frankly artificial and fragmentary. Hence, Dogpatch USA at Marble Falls, will be a new creation itself, the first Dogpatch to ever exist. Physically, then, the park will originate, not reproduce, Dogpatch.”

Another quintessentially postmodern gesture at Dogpatch was a malicious irony that signified on the historical and economic forces behind not only Dogpatch USA, but the history of both Ozark and Appalachian mountaineers: The first railroad to run in Newton County was the one laid in 1968 at Dogpatch. The county was the poorest in the state, but the track didn’t link it to the rest of the country. Instead, the railroad ran in a circle around the circumference of Dogpatch USA, a fabulistic hillbilly funland. The irony wasn’t lost on the people in the area. The editor of a local paper wrote: Thanks to Dogpatch, Newton County now has a railroad—no train yet, just a railroad. All over the country railroads are diminishing and here in Newton County one is being built for the first time. Can you top that?”

When Dogpatch opened, it featured craftsfolk from the Ozarks displaying and selling their skills and products. It presented these “authentic” people in an “inauthentic” stereotyped context of moonshine, overalls and feudists. For example, they hired W.H. Smith, the head of the Arkansas Beekeepers Association, to play J. Goodbody Sweetpants and run the Honey House on Cornpone Square. And not only was Dogpatch the “authentic” version of the cartoon place, but was also presented at the same time as a version of a real, historic place. The issues were so confusing that in another article, a Dogpatch official said, “the objective of Dogpatch [is] ‘to restore the culture of the days of the past, maintain the culture of today and provide recreation for all age groups without destroying any of the natural beauty of the valley.'” The equating of Dogpatch with genuine mountain culture was also evident in a statement by Capp: “You don’t meet a nicer batch of people than here in the real Dogpatch.” The “real” Dogpatch? In the same breath, Capp added, “Until today I had thought of Dogpatch as sort of a pleasant re-run of an old Bob Burns movie. But now—isn’t it the most fantastic thing you’ve ever seen?” But what were they seeing? The trade magazine Amusement

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Business

in 1967 had already picked up on the weirdness. “The Marble Falls setting and some of the old buildings at the site already looked remarkably like the comic strip scene.”

Which came first? The Marble Falls setting or the version in the newspaper? And which version makes the other valid? Does Li’l Abner make Marble Falls the “real’ Dogpatch? Or does Marble Falls, because it looks like “the comic strip scene” make Li’l Abner a legitimate version of mountaineer culture? Such manufactured confusion is how stereotypes get perpetuated and used as substitutes for the more actual: it’s the classic pattern for the flim-flam: there’s enough reality to convince someone to accept the genuine fake. This masterful blurring of the lines between the authentic, the replica and the hegemonic lampoon is, to me, Dogpatch’s claim to a place on the National Register. Restored to its original condition, it could easily serve as a living classroom, illustrating lessons for schoolkids in the dynamics of cultural politics and internal colonialism.

Dogpatch USA opened on May 17, 1968. Only a few weeks later, the U.S. Department of Interior’s Board of Geographic Names approved “Dogpatch, Arkansas,” as the name for the community served by the (former) Marble Falls post office. Dogpatch had been put on the map; its reality was official.

The park opened just as Capp, the one-time anti-McCarthyite hero, was embarking on a public speaking campaign that would permanently bury his reputation as a liberal. In 1967 he lambasted Joan Baez via a Li’l Abner character named Joanie Phoanie. From 1968 to 1970, he was a popular campus lecture guest—a fiery and witty, anti-welfare, anti-hippie, pro-war speaker students loved to hate. On the stump he had solutions for everything—On welfare mothers: “Chastity belts.” On the Vietnam war: “I say shoot back.” On Kent State: “The real Kent State martyrs were the kids in uniform.” Capp even praised former Arkansas segregationist governor Orval Faubus and Dogpatch’s first general manager, as being “prematurely right.” In 1970 Capp switched parties from Democrat to Republican and contemplated a challenge to Ted Kennedy for the Senate. Capp’s campus blitzkrieg came to a humiliating end when, in 1971, he was caught up in a scandal when he pleaded guilty to a Wisconsin student’s charge of “attempted adultery.”

Capp went into seclusion. By the mid-1970s, newspapers across the country were dropping Li’l Abner as Capp’s keen satirical vision grew confused and his once-clever voice became merely bilious. Capp, emphysemic and confined to a wheelchair, finally killed the strip in 1977. Capp himself died two years later. By this time, Dogpatch USA had fallen from its glory days when it was

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run by Faubus and hosted visitors from hit TV shows like Petticoat Junction. By the end of the decade, the park was renting itself out for weddings and hosting such tourist magnets as the regional arm wrestling championship. In 1980, Dogpatch USA went bankrupt.

But today there are indications that the fortunes of Dogpatch are beginning to improve. Forty-five minutes to the north is the throbbing pump of the region’s latest tourist boom, the glittering neon capital of neo-country: Branson, Missouri. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as Silver Dollar City became a popular attraction, more and more country music acts were drawn to Branson. In 1983, Roy Clark put his name on a marquee and Branson’s retro-rockets ignited. Following Clark were Conway Twitty, Roger Miller, Mel Tillis, Ray Stevens, George Jones, Micky Gilley, Jim Stafford, Johnny and June Cash, Andy Williams, Merle Haggard. Branson by the 1990s has become the Hillbilly Las Vegas, a contender for Nashville’s title of Music City USA. The flocking of road-weary stars to Branson prompted Waylon Jennings to say, “This has gotta be country music heaven. Most of the people I thought were dead are up here singing.”

Dogpatch USA, located on the out-of-the-way winding Scenic Highway 7, couldn’t successfully compete with Silver Dollar City and the country music theaters in Branson. Ironically, however, the thriving country music showcases in Branson and Silver Dollar City’s mile-high attendance figures are now contributing to Dogpatch’s survival.

“No doubt about it, Branson has been a blessing,” said Melvin Bell, who has owned Dogpatch for six years. Mr. Bell bought the park from a group of investors who bought it after the park had been seized in bankruptcy by a Memphis bank in 1980.

“We’re on the route to Branson, so we have all the tour buses coming up Scenic 7. Dogpatch is becoming the place to stop.”

Mr. Bell said that the fact that the Li’l Abner cartoon no longer runs has had a negative effect on Dogpatch, but its dubious legacy should be good for a more years.

“Most of the people who go to Branson grew up with Li’l Abner,” Mr. Bell said. “So from that standpoint and the next ten or fifteen years, I would imagine, you’ve people who are familiar with it and once they see it they want to stop. Our numbers are looking better. From now on, we’re going to be more aggressive.”

Such are the vagaries of American tourism. What once simulated life, lives again. “Hillbilly,” as a crowd pleaser, still works. To quote a billboard along the approach to fabricated nineteenth century mining town Silver Dollar City, “You’ve got a great past ahead of you.”

Rodger Brown is author of Party Out of Bounds: The B-52s, R.E.M., and The Kids Who Rocked Athens, Georgia. He is completing a Southern travelogue to be published next fall.

Martyr and Killer: Two Lives and Alabama

Reviewed by Rev. Francis X. Walter

Vol. 15, No. 3, 1993, pp. 27, 29-30

Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, by Charles W. Eagles (The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1993, 335 pages).

If it were a symphony, Outside Agitator would be in a dark and minor key. Critics would advance words like “measured” and “elegiac.” It would be said that the composer created, with competence, a majestic theme, sad and solemn. Sad because each advancing note led the hearer ever more deeply to admit the potential of humankind for goodness, yet all the while moving to a climax of death, a death of unimaginable human potential. Wiser hearts would hear beneath these themes elements of hope and resurrection.

It is the story of Jonathan Daniels, the Episcopal seminary student born in 1939 in Keene, New Hampshire, shot to death in Hayneville, Alabama, August 20, 1965. Until the publication of Outside Agitator the best account of Jonathan Daniels was The Jon Daniels Story, With His Letters and Papers, The Rev. William J. Schneider, The Seabury Press, New York, 1969.

But Outside Agitator is not hagiography. Martyrologies never include even tempered accounts of the ones who kill saints. Charles Eagles has won the trust, and perhaps the friendship, of Jon’s killer, Tom Coleman of Lowndes County. So this is the story of two men, the martyr and the executioner.

Tom Coleman is the son of Jesse Coleman. Jesse held both the offices of sheriff and school superintendent of Lowndes County. Jesse was sheriff for a few years just before Tom’s birth in 1910. Jesse retired in 1939 from a long incumbency as the elected school superintendent of the county. That was the year Jon was born and Tom was twenty-nine years old. Admirers documenting the sparkling young man who died in accord with his faith have not spoken with Tom Coleman. Coleman wouldn’t talk to those kinds of folks. But it is also because Jon’s friends and admirers have known that they could not sit down with Tom, even today, with the curiosity, humor, forgiveness and acceptance that Jon, the one he killed, would bring to such a meeting.

One other principal character is introduced. At first this seems an unnecessary intrusion—the reader is charmed by the personal revelations of this gifted human being, Jon Daniels. Here is the best that our nation and the Christian Church can produce. The reader doesn’t want to leave off about Jon. But a socio-economic study begins; charts from the Census Bureau appear. Then one sees how important bloody Lowndes County is to the story. It stumbles onto the stage, a character itself. It enters, not a vicious killer, but a sad loser, always making the wrong choices, always settling for less so that fewer and fewer will control what is left, always having less and less, leading a boring, unreflective, violent life, slowly descending into torpor, decreasing in population, resources and thought. Lowndes County is revealed, an idiot child, bruised and sick. Do not entertain the notion that Lowndes is an aberration in United States society. Who can say, “Well, it’s just the worst county in the country, but so what? A place like that has nothing to do with….” Nothing to do with where I live, nothing to do with Atlanta, or Pittsburgh, or Selma. It does have to do. Lowndes is somebody’s child. Our child, our lineage.

Eagles brings a host of other characters to life. John Hulett, the strategist of the Lowndes civil rights struggle, who became the first black sheriff of the county, becomes the focus of hope. If Lowndes County can produce Coleman, it also can produce Hulett. The Rt. Rev. Charles C.J. Carpenter, the then Bishop of Alabama, and the Rev. Frank Mathews, then rector of St. Paul’s Church in Selma, represent the Southern whites who would never kill or strike or curse but who remained largely out of redemptive action, paralyzed by a constituency going nowhere yet goaded by a set of founding principles that was moving others to engage present realities. Bishop Carpenter’s role illuminates how hard it is to define what is often glibly called a “moderate” position during the Civil Rights Movement.

(An interesting portrayal of Carpenter’s actions is

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“Bishop C.C.J. Carpenter: From Segregation to Integration” by S. Jonathan Bass, Volume XLV, Number 3 of The Alabama Review, July 1992, pp 184-215.)

Jon’s old seminary dean, the Rt. Rev. John Coburn, recalled in a memorial lecture in 1991, “…I was on holiday in Paris…completing a sabbatical semester…. On the morning of August 22 I received a cablegram…: ‘Jonathan Daniels murdered in Alabama. Service in Keene, New Hampshire, on August 24.’ When I undertook to change my plane reservations, I was asked why this was necessary. On the ticket counter was a newspaper: on the front page an article about the American ‘Etudiant Mort.’ I said, ‘That is why I am returning!’ In five minutes I had my ticket.”

On August 22 a visitor worshipped at the Sunday 11 a.m. service at St. Paul’s, Selma. Behind him were the rear pews where Jon and black Christians in Selma had been restricted so that they would be last at the communion rail. With hairsplitting attention, Bishop Carpenter prevailed against those who would not have allowed black and white agitators to receive communion. But Carpenter despoiled his action of hope and faith by also allowing the vestry members to keep integrated groups in the rear so as to make their lips the last to touch the chalice. At this service two days after his death there was no mention of Jon, not one prayer, not one reflection on what had happened. After the service the Rector pointed out quite correctly another split hair: prayers for the dead were commonly only offered on Sundays at the previous early service, so Jon had got his prayer. While Paris blazoned Etudiant Mort!, Selma’s white Episcopalians, hurt and stunned, could not bring into the healing consciousness of worship the awful thing that had happened.

One of the knots that Eagles entices the reader to untangle is: what should be the role of prudence when one steps out in faith to realize one’s self and the best in one’s culture? Was Jon heedless, did he not know his behavior could get him killed? Eagles has many examples of Jon acting and speaking with blacks and whites as if racism did not exist, as if a reign of peace and justice actually existed in Selma and Lowndes County in 1965. If he knew the danger (and he did) what was his obligation to himself, God, and his Church to exercise caution? Just how much Kingdom should a person in extreme circumstances live in order to offer his due to God and humanity? The reader is urged to decide this in the case of Jon Daniels. It is to be earnestly hoped the reader will consider his or her own case. It is good to be prepared should such a time of decision come to us.

Jon led an examined life. Tom led an unexamined life. Jon wanted to explore agape. Tom wanted to keep everything the same, to protect the little he had. Tom protected a bunch of lies to keep an easy life. Jon explored the truth and was racked with sorrow that it hurt people for him to do so. Jon had vision. Tom could not visualize Lowndes County without an order such as his father provided. He got up from his courthouse domino game and killed to keep the only order he could imagine. Tom had a sense of place, local, un-nuanced. He loved the land of Lowndes County. Jon lived a lot of his life in the Spirit, and tried to love the oikoumene—the whole inhabited earth.

There is a story of a nineteenth century Italian politician exhorting a peasant about the glories of a possible Italian fatherland. The peasant stooped for a clod from his farm, pushed it in the politician’s face and said, “Mia patria.”

The value in Tom’s way has shown itself over and over in the Black Belt of Alabama—after the Movement days—in the cooperation of local blacks and whites. This has happened often to the disgust of principled outside agitators. After the Rev. William Branch won the election for Probate Judge in Greene County, Alabama, he received word from a highborn white opponent who had held an appointed office in the county, that he would now serve Branch if Branch would have him. It is said that when asked about it this descendant of planters said, “Hell, our family pulled up and came to Greene County when the slaves got free and took over Haiti. We settled in Greene County. I’ll be damned if I’m going to leave again.” He served and county politics became much more interesting and complex. That is practical love, mia patria tending to the Kingdom of God.

Five years after Jon’s death, five years after the first blacks had registered to vote, John Hulett was elected High Sheriff of Lowndes County. That 1970 election also saw blacks elected coroner and circuit clerk and by the end of the 1970s blacks effectively controlled the county government.

In 1992 John Hulett, who was soon to retire, told two visitors that after his election he received a telephone call from Tom Coleman. Tom told Hulett he hadn’t voted for him but since he knew Hulett would get no cooperation from the former sheriff or his staff and would only find rooms stripped of records when he entered the courthouse and since John was the elected sheriff, he, Coleman, would do what he could to help him be a good sheriff. They could stay in touch by phone. Tom owned a scanner. His son was a state trooper. Tom could convey helpful information to John. But if Hulett ever breathed a word of this Tom would deny it and stop helping. Eagles confirmed this relationship and notes that Tom perhaps wistfully acknowledged that all through those years of collaboration he could never call John “Mr. Hulett.”

From 1970 until Hulett’s 1992 retirement the two

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men worked together. When asked if Tom Coleman was his friend John Hulett smiled.

That is the hope. That is the resurrection. At least to the eye of faith. It is this sort of real community that the South should bank on. And should celebrate. Not interest groups raving at each other to win a morsel from time to time. Sadly, those are necessary. But should we not more cherish those people, who sharing a common horror and common love, reach out together to tackle a common task?

This book ends with an acknowledgment of the action of the Episcopal Church in 1991 to place Jonathan Daniels in its liturgical calendar as a martyr. Jon is memorialized on August 14, the Eve of the Annunciation, the day of his final arrest in Fort Deposit. It was during the singing of Mary’s song, the Magnificat, in seminary chapel that Jon decided to go to Selma.

It is to be regretted that the author had to stop and did not recount the politics of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church which, among other twists and turns in saint-making, had to set aside its own rules that a candidate for the calendar had to have been dead for fifty years. Jon’s recognition received the unanimous vote of both the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies. The present Bishops of Alabama and New Hampshire jointly presented the resolution. This was done in the presence of Richard Morrisroe, who survived Coleman’s second shot.

This action of a denomination, with present troubles of its own, provided a kind of counter trial to the one in Hayneville that acquitted Tom Coleman of all charges. Eagles’ gripping account of that travesty and the ensuing impotence of the federal government would have been balanced by the evaluation of Jon as a martyr of the Church.

Outside Agitator is about the United States of America.

The Rev. Francis X. Walter is currently rector of St. Andrews Episcopal Church in Birmingham. After Jonathan Daniels’s death, Father Walter was sent by the Selma Interreligious Project to continue a ministry of presence in Selma and the surrounding counties.

Thurmond

Reviewed by Tom Terrill

Vol. 15, No. 3, 1993, pp. 30-32

Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change, Nadine Cohodas (Simon and Schuster, 1993, 574 pages).

This is a workmanlike, well researched, but narrowly conceived study of one of the most durable politicians in American history. Focusing almost entirely on the single issue of Thurmond and race relations and ignoring virtually every other aspect of his career, Cohodas produced a relentlessly monothematic book that sometimes reduces the reader to being something like a spectator at a Depression-era marathon dance. The Senator dances on and on and on to the same tune: states rights and the preservation of Jim Crow, at least until Jim Crow expires. Even if one assumes that the Senator’s political career is monothematic—and I don’t, that theme has more complexity than this narrative suggests.

Most readers of Southern Changes will find little that is new either in Cohodas’s narrative of Senator Thurmond’s long political career or in her story of the civil rights revolution. Her decision to follow Thurmond through his background that included Ben Tillman and “bloody” Edgefield County provides valuable context for her principal theme: the remarkable, as she sees it, transformation of Thurmond from arch-enemy of the civil rights movement to supporter of civil rights legislation and active supplicant of black votes.

Son of a comfortable, respected small town lawyer, Thurmond grew up in a household and community at-

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tuned to politics. Enormously energetic and ambitious, Thurmond pursued his career in public life with an arresting single-mindedness—school superintendent, lawyer, state senator, state judge, governor, presidential candidate, and U.S. senator. The only person ever elected as a write-in candidate to the U.S. Senate, Thurmond has throughout demonstrated a remarkable capacity for feeling the public pulse and for hard work.

He also possessed blinkered vision. He claims be never hated African-Americans yet fought tenaciously to preserve Jim Crow. He denounced civil rights activists and their supporters, never acknowledged the heroism of the civil rights workers or forthrightly rejected the violent actions of their opponents, and even decried the civil rights movement as communistic. Cohodas does not blink about these matters. She bluntly discusses Thurmond’s wretched record on civil rights and, like others have, she wonders how Thurmond is able to claim he bore blacks no ill. Perhaps, no one, not even the Senator, can explain that.

Other puzzles about Thurmond remain, only a few of which are touched upon in Strom Thurmond. Why Thurmond went from being a moderate, even liberal governor to becoming one of Jim Crow’s most vocal and persistent defenders probably cannot be explained. Long a supporter of public education, Thurmond continued that commitment as governor. He favored creating kindergartens and nursery schools as well as trade schools and increasing the portion of public funding received by black schools. He also wanted to abolish the poll tax and adopt the secret ballot. He favored “‘equal rights for women, in every respect.'” How far he (or South Carolina) was willing to go at the time, however, was suggested by his specific recommendation that women be allowed to serve on jury duty. Cohodas may have the best answer to Thurmond’s retreat from liberalism: she thinks he may have become a captive to his 1948 presidential race which permanently labeled him as a reactionary segregationist.

Cohodas notes that Thurmond’s states’ rights stand rests upon two foundations: his belief that federal power is more threatening to individual freedom than is the power of state governments and his understanding of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution as the guarantor of states’ rights. Thurmond obviously has long chosen to ignore the supremacy clause in the Constitution and the ambiguity of the Tenth Amendment. Cohodas does remark that Thurmond’s reading of the Tenth Amendment may be overly simplistic but she does not pursue that point, and she does not mention the supremacy clause or seem to be aware of the numerous readily available studies about the background and vagueness of the Tenth Amendment.

That the federal government presents a greater threat to individual liberty than do the state governments is, at the very least, an arguable proposition. The proposition should have been explored in this book. Similarly, Thurmond’s disinclination to see any connection between massive defense spending, which he has consistently supported, and expanding power in Washington warrants some discussion.

Broadening her focus would have allowed her to look at some striking aspects of Thurmond’s career and raise some very fundamental questions about that career. A wider angle of vision might have prevented her from the erroneous conclusion that the Senator in 1964 “had set in motion the factors that transformed the white South from a Democratic stronghold to a bastion of Republicanism.” Durable as he is, the Senator is not the Charles Atlas of Southern politics.

Why, after all his years in the Senate, has Thurmond never become a major figure in that body? Why has the “rebel Senator” become such a party-line Republican? Thurmond, an early leader in the Senate in maximizing

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service to constituents, seems to have created a Senate office that resembles a highly efficient mail-order business. Many of us may wonder if that is an appropriate use for that high office. It is certainly a popular use. Why has Thurmond been so supportive of business interests and so hostile to organized labor? What great political risks has Thurmond been willing to take? Why did he favor Nixon over Reagan in 1968 and John Connally over Reagan in 1980? Finally, a broader focus might have prompted to do more than merely quote John West’s assessment of Thurmond’s basic motives. The former South Carolina governor said of Thurmond’s 1952 write-in campaign that it was “100 percent expediency. Strom has never been loyal to anyone but Strom.”

Thurmond’s greatest importance in American politics came from his break with the Democrats and his helping to build a Republican South. But there was no more discontinuity than continuity in that break. The crude racial politics of the Ben Tillman and the earlier Strom Thurmond may be dead, but color obviously still shows its power at election time. With the exception of Arkansas, President Clinton failed to get a majority of white votes in any Southern state in 1992. As has been the case with Senator Thurmond’s political career, race remains the dominant theme in the politics of the South.

Tom Terrill is professor of history at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. He is co-author of The American South: A History, published in 1991.

Changing Appalachia

Reviewed by Tal Stanley

Vol. 15, No. 3, 1993, pp. 32-35

Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change, edited by Stephen L. Fisher (Temple University Press, Philadelpia, 1993, 365 pages).

One of the first things I remember about that spring ten years ago is the weather: rain. Indeed, it seemed to rain all spring and we could not see White Top Mountain for days at a time. I also remember that spring as a season of deep, profound change and struggle for my life. A new social consciousness began to emerge for me. I was a college senior participating in a seminar led by Steve Fisher. The seminar focused on issues of work and workplace democracy in America and Appalachia. We discovered and explored how those of us in the seminar had been shaped and injured, divided, and limited by a class society. We discussed how work particularly and society generally might be changed to be democratic, fair for all. From the perspective of ten springs of work and study those discussions have changed much of my thinking and continue to be formative for my life.

In Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change, Steve Fisher and his collaborators continue that process of education and change. Serving as both narrative history and a tool box for social protest and dissent, resistance and change in the Appalachian region, these sixteen essays are guided by five foundational questions and issues. First, “what factors have led to the success or failure of particular change efforts” in Appalachia? Second, “how have issues of race, class, gender and culture shaped resistance efforts?” Third, “what impact have national and global structures and events had on local movements for change?” Fourth, “what is legitimate about the notion of regional identity, and what role, if any, has it played in progressive efforts?” Fifth, “what organizing strategies make sense for the future?” By addressing these five questions, each of the essayists works to dispel the culturally-produced images of Appalachia as an isolated backwater, populated by gun-toting, ignorant people complicitous in their victimization, “culturally incapable of rational resistance to unjust conditions.” What follows are eyewitness histories of grassroots movements in the region and the practical lessons learned through success and failure.

The first seven essays critically examine the issues, potentials, and obstacles to community organizing in Central and Southern Appalachia. Beginning with Mary Beth Bingman’s account of her participation in the anti-strip mining protests in Knott County, Kentucky in January, 1972, the efforts at resistance and change that are examined are those which have emerged in the region over the last twenty years. Together with Bingman, Sherry Cable’s account of the Yellow Creek Concerned Citizens organization, Bill Allen’s writing about Save Our Cumberland Mountains, Joe Szakos’ essay on Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, and Hal Hamilton and Ellen Ryan’s discussion of the Community Farm Alliance, provide glimpses of the evolution of social resistance and change, both in local communities and in the movements themselves. The essays point to a “movement of movements” diverse in its goals and membership, complex in the ways real change is realized.

These candid histories trace the transformation of organizing movements from local, individual frustration and dissent into agents of local, state, and even national collective resistance and social change. Yet throughout the failures and successes, these organizations maintain a distinctive Appalachian identity and strength. These essayists point to a number of elements common to successful Appalachian efforts at change which are repre-

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sentative of a movement away from single-issue protest groups to multi-issue organization, from less staff-dominated leadership to more shared decision-making in a context of radical democracy.

As narrative histories and effective organizing tools, this first section of Fighting Back also discusses the cultural racism, isolationism, and parochialism that tends to cripple organizing efforts, but also suggests ways that an empowering solidarity might be produced in those same efforts. Don Manning-Miller offers an overview of citizen’s groups in Appalachia and criticizes an inherent tendency among many grassroots organizations to ignore the presence and debilitating effects of racism within their own structures and membership. He outlines specific steps by which citizen groups may confront and collectively change their racist inclinations, so that Appalachian activism may be committed to a “thoroughgoing equality within and among organizations and in society at large … [and to] a successful people’s movement in our time.”

Also in the first section, John Glen’s narrative history of the involvement of the Highlander Center with Appalachian community organizing details the false starts and sometimes painful effort at redirection through which resistance and change movements must move in order to be multi-issue, multi-regional, multi-racial, and democratically defined. This is an undocumented facet of the Highlander history, but it is a history intertwined with the emergence and evolution of many grassroots movements in Appalachia. Glen shows that what may have worked in the labor movement and the civil rights struggle may not be applicable in every place, and that regional and local differences do matter. He demonstrates the complexity of social dissent and change in Appalachia, and convincingly argues for the long view of social change for the region and for Highlander, what Raymond Williams called “the long revolution.” Taking this long view enables Glen to assert that for the Center and for Appalachia “the battle for the future of the region will remain an extended and sometimes confusing struggle.”

Fighting Back’s second part, “New Strategies in Labor Struggles,” discusses some of the ways the struggle for change is experienced in Appalachian workplaces. Perhaps the most moving of the essays in the entire volume is Jim Sessions and Fran Ansley’s narrative, “Singing Across Dark Spaces: The Union/Community Takeover of the Pittston Moss 3 Plant.” Sessions and Ansley discuss how at the height of the 1989 UMWA strike against the Pittston Coal Company, the union and the community found direction by retelling the community’s memories of struggles between miners and management in the 1930s and by appropriating the nonviolent tradition of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. The Pittston struggle held out the possibility that we might “…get a glimpse of what a less oppressive set of race and gender relations might one day look like.” While acknowledging the bitterness and disappointments concomitant with any social struggle, this narrative makes clear that near St. Paul, Virginia, inside and outside the Moss 3 Plant there were “moments of transcendence that [were] capable of teaching us, of making us feel the possibilities that reside in us, in the people around us, and in the groups of which were are or can be a part.”

The third section of the book examines how a regional identity is a critical force in the “construction of class consciousness, gender relations, regional identity, and community life.” The essays in this section demonstrate the complex and interdependent relationship between regional identity and social change: social change in Appalachia depends on a strong regional identity, but the formation of that regional identity depends on a fundamental change in people’s social consciousness. These authors argue for an Appalachian identity that moves beyond earlier parochialism to a vision of Appalachia closely aligned with other regions and cultures giv-

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ing the promise of “global solidarity” for resistance and change. The most theoretical of the book’s sections, this third section also tends to be the most problematic. Particularly troubling is the tendency toward viewing the postmodern era as an entirely positive and good force. Alan Banks, Dwight Billings, and Karen Tice assert in their discussion of Appalachian Studies that postmodernity is a sensibility that “involves a heightened and healthy skepticism about truth claims” and metanarratives that ignored the regional, cultural diversity of Appalachia and Appalachians. I can agree with this, and much that Banks, Billings, and Tice put forward in their essay regarding the potential of post modernity for Appalachian studies and resistance. Trouble arises when they “reject [the] harshly critical views of postmodernity… [and] see a distinctly democratic temper in postmodernism’s … approach.” This unquestioning position ignores the material, social realities of postmodernity.

Between 1980 and 1990 the former coal producing counties in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia lost an average of 11.5 percent of population; McDowell County, West Virginia alone lost 29.4 percent. The 1990 census reported that 57.4 percent of all households with a single female as householder lived below the poverty line. In Smyth County, Virginia, 73.2 percent of single female households were below the poverty line. In 1979, in the early years of postmodernity, 11.7 percent of the national population was below the poverty line, by 1991 that same number had risen to 14.2 percent. During the same years (1979-1991) the number of African Americans below the poverty line rose from 31.0 to 32.7 percent nationally. In 1992 national unemployment stood at 5.9 percent, but 10.4 percent of African American men and 10.6 percent of African American women were unemployed. By rejecting more critical views of postmodernity, Banks, Billings, and Tice ignore the forces working against empowerment and change.

Steve Fisher’s concluding essay to Fighting Back is the most useful of all. Fisher’s essay helps us to understand that practice and theory go hand in hand and are never divorced from the daily realities of lived experience in real places.

Theoretically, Fisher sets out to review and critique two currently dominant approaches to Appalachian research and social change: Marxism and neo-populism. He focuses his argument on the concepts of “community” and “democracy,” suggesting that although idealized by neo-populists and dismissed by many Marxists, they are more complex and integral to efforts at change than either theory has heretofore admitted. As the romanticized property of the neo-populists such as Sara Evans, Harry Boyte, Lawrence Goodwyn, Jean Bethke Elshtain,

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and Christopher Lasch, “community” and “democracy” are divisive and limiting pressures. Neo-populists “conveniently ignore,” suggests Fisher, “the ethnic, racial, gender, class, and cultural differences that so often divide the people.”

Fisher contends that many traditional Marxists view “community” and “democracy” as barriers to “a collective awareness which is the essence of class consciousness.” Citing the general failure of class-based organizing in Appalachia, he argues that by repudiating traditional institutions, Marxists have misrepresented and ignored the positive local force “community” and “democracy” have as sources of “radical insurgency.” As the capstone to Fighting Back, Fisher’s work presses for “concrete structural definitions” of “community” and “democracy.” Once “community” and “democracy” are connected to concrete social realities we are able to understand how they are used as instruments in global systems of oppression and to see them as providing local roots and sources of radical activism.

Fisher argues for an activism that moves beyond localism, built on the material realities that national and global forces are determinative and transformative of lived experience in any locality. His essay lays the groundwork for a practical class-based activism that recognizes economic conditions as just one among a host of other social forces formative of class consciousness. He asserts that what is required is a people’s history and a history of capitalism … [and] the creation of resistance organizations that take culture and community seriously as spaces for political action while encouraging their members to discover the ways in which their grievances are a result of structural processes occurring at an economic, geographic, and political level far beyond the particular locale where the grievance is experience.

Indeed, this taking seriously culture and communities is the strength of Fighting Back, and the practical work of its editor.

Anyone familiar with Steve Fisher will know that one of his more significant contributions to Appalachian research and activism has been bibliographic. The bibliography which concludes this volume is another one of these contributions, extending all of the essays in Fighting Back from being important only to local, Appalachian efforts of change to national, even global significance; from being valuable histories to indispensable tools.

Steve Fisher writes that in the struggle for Appalachian change “[t]here is no easy path, no neat resolutions…” but sometimes, as in the UMWA’s takeover of the Pittston plant, we get “a glimpse of what could be.” Fighting Back in Appalachia offers us one of those glimpses.

A native of Southwest Virginia, Tal Stanley is at Emory University studying American regionalism in the context of Appalachia.

Notable Re-releases

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 15, No. 3, 1993, pp. 35-36

Willie Mae, by Elizabeth Kytle, has been re-issued again, this time by the University of Georgia Press. First published in 1958, an earlier re-release of this book about a black domestic worker was reviewed in these pages in September 1991 (by Jane Maguire Abram). That edition and this one had a foreword by Joyce Ladner—scholar and black advocate—which amidst other praise said, “Now, at a time when there is much talk about a ‘permanent’ underclass, Willie Mae challenges us to dismiss notions of permanence and inevitability.” Barbara Carney of Durham’s Baobab Source Bookstore read the book, and said, “I never even once heard this white woman’s voice [i.e. E.K.’s] in it at all.” Strong commendation, for a 1950s book. William Pickens published the first part of his autobiography (under the title of The Heir of Slaves) in 1911, and an expanded version, Bursting Bonds, now reissued by the Indiana University Press, in 1923. It is scarcely a complete autobiography, for Pickens lived until 1954; nor does the editor’s introduction add enough detail to support his claim that Pickens, academician and NAACP staffer, was “one of the half-dozen best known black men of his time.” It is an interesting story, though one leaves it hardly understanding the extravagant statements that Henry Louis Gates and some others have made as to its importance.

Henrietta Buckmaster’s powerful Let My People Go as been re-issued, with a new introduction by Darlene Clark Hine, by the University of South Carolina Press. First published in 1941, it has ever since importantly brought forward, as promised in its sub-title, “The Story of the Underground Railroad and the Growth of the Abolition Movement.”

Frank Tannenbaum was a great and versatile scholar until his death in 1969. His learning took in many subjects: Latin America, American labor history, race. His Slave and Citizen—128 pages of text, 245 footnotes—came out in 1946, Beacon Press has now re-published it—is a fascinating comparison between the status of slaves and later of black people in Latin America on the one hand and in the United States on the other. The differences, derived from differing religious and legal traditions, ever profound and, in point of human dignity, all in favor of

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Latin America, though today’s reporting from Brazil, for example, does not confirm that. Perhaps Tannenbaum anticipated even that, for after 166 pages delineating fundamental distinctions, he suddenly, and astonishingly, announced that in “end result” the two systems have “proved to be the same.”

It is likely always worthwhile to see ourselves through others’ eyes. Americans read what Americans write about other people, but too seldom, apart from the classics that began when de Tocqueville wrote, do we read what foreign commentators say about us. Cracking the Ike Age: Aspects of Fifties America comes from Denmark, published by the Aarhus University Press. One chapter, on “Black Protest in the Fifties and Forties” by a British scholar, Peter Ling, illustrates the strength and weakness often to be found in cross-cultural literature. Foreign observers, including us, quite often see that which natives tend to look away from, as does Ling when he perceives that when labor unions found themselves embattled by the Eisenhower administration, blacks were forced to depend more and more on themselves, less and less on labor, for the direction and resources of their movement; labor would have to follow in the ranks, not lead as co-pace setter. At the same time, foreign observers may take overly seriously some persons and points of view which they run across.

Leslie Dunbar, now a resident of Durham, N. C, is the former book review editor of Southern Changes and a life fellow of the Southern Regional Council.

Living Out Here

Reviewed by John Howard

Vol. 15, No. 3, 1993, pp. 36-39

Greetings from Out Here by Ellen Spiro (1993, 57 mins., video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 37 South Wabash Ave., Chicago, IL 60603).

Intuitively, we know that life for lesbians and gays in the South is difficult—perhaps more difficult than for those in other sections of the country. In The Construction of Homosexuality (1988), sociologist David Greenberg summarizes recent studies which seem to support to this assumption: “In survey research, respondents from the South, from small towns, and from rural areas, who are older, poorer, and less well-educated, are more likely to think homosexuality wrong and to oppose gay rights” than other Americans. “Religion is a more powerful predictor than any other individual trait,” and evangelical Protestants, who are proportionally more numerous in the South, “are the most likely (88.7 percent) to think homosexuality immoral.” Such findings obviously mask the great variations that exist across the regions of the South. Yet, the section as a whole would appear to have warranted its reputation as a distinctly inhospitable place for sexual non-conformists.

Despite or because of these conditions, lesbian and gay Southerners have become increasingly visible lately in both the cultural and political realms. Anger over President Clinton’s failure to lift the military ban, due in large part to the obstinate Sam Nunn, has brought many previously apolitical and apathetic lesbians and gays into

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the streets, especially in the South. Stressing responsibilities over rights and emphasizing the desires to serve the country and form families, organizers have capitalized on the “mainstream” appeal of the military issue, along with domestic partnership, to broaden the base of support for gay rights—though not without considerable misgivings from more leftward-leaning critics.

The vitality of the movement has been evident in the sheer numbers of casual participants and in the daring of committed activists. Atlanta, considered by many the gay urban mecca of the Southeast, witnessed over. 100,000 people marching through the streets in late June as part of the annual Lesbian and Gay Pride celebration. The Houston event also drew large crowds, while organizers in less populous cities like Chattanooga defied contentious city council members and neighborhood and religious associations to proceed with smaller-scale parades and picnics.

Activists successfully lobbied for domestic partnership registries in Atlanta and New Orleans this summer, but both municipalities balked at extending health insurance and other benefits to the registered partners of city employees. By vetoing this provision, Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson, blatantly at odds with campaign promises made to the lesbian and gay communities, sparked numerous, riley protests throughout the city. (Jackson later signed a virtually identical bill.) Demonstrations have not been limited, however, to the major urban centers. Last year in Alabama, with lesbian and gay student organizations spreading from campuses in Tuscaloosa and Huntsville to Birmingham, Auburn, and Mobile, state legislators in Montgomery flouted two decades of federal court precedents and outlawed funding and the use of public facilities by such groups. Students responded with a rally of hundreds at Auburn, a splashy kiss-in at the University of Alabama, and an ACLU-backed lawsuit. Even a day at the beach became a hot political issue: In May 1993, Pensacola city councilman Doug Proffitt railed against lesbian and gay tourists, said to number 30,000 over the Memorial Day weekend. He decried “their disgusting acts,” while they stamped “gay money” on their dollars as a sign of economic clout.

Certainly not a recent phenomenon, today’s activism derives from political engagement begun after the Second World War, reinvigorated by the 1969 Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, and informed in the sixties and seventies by the women’s and, especially in the South, the civil rights movements. It reached a new crest during the Reagan-Bush era, when indifference to the AIDS crisis was construed by many activists as genocidal neglect the willful murder of thousands of undesirables. Now, a lesbian and gay political structure, albeit a fractured and incohesive one, is firmly, intractably in place.

Cultural workers in the South have kept apace of political developments. Writers particularly are wresting control of lesbian and gay representations away from the historically hostile, so-called experts—pastors, politicians, policemen, and physicians. Lesbians and gays increasingly are telling their own stories, writing of their own experiences. And the publishing houses have gladly provided the medium: “Publication of gay and lesbian authors is at an all-time high,” says Mississippi-native Stella Connell, a publicist with Pantheon Books, a division of Random House. “Gay and lesbian subject matter is no longer taboo. Hardly. It’s all the rage. Though I don’t know as many Southern writers being published, there’s no question in my mind that houses want gay material.”

Indeed, a number of Southerners boldly address gay issues in recent books. Although readily apparent and empowering to many readers of their time, the veiled, ambiguous protagonists of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams are no more. A new generation can and does speak openly of sexual diversity. Essayists Minnie Bruce Pratt and Mab Segrest forthrightly engage lesbian life in the South in revealing, autobiographical accounts, while gay male novelists write fiction that clearly draws upon personal experiences. Greg Johnson’s first novel, Pagan Babies (1993), tracks the coming-of-age of a Texas-born Catholic through the gay nightlife of Dallas and Atlanta, whereas Joey Manley in his powerful first novel, The Death of Donna-May Dean (1991), exposes a minute but significant portion of Southern gay culture-the busy melange of men and would-be women who frequent the public park after dark in Manley’s hometown of Florence, Alabama.

These authors’ words, read by an increasingly large audience, are not going unnoticed by a wider population. Reactions in the South, as elsewhere, can be less than

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congenial. A National Book Award finalist for her novel Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), Dorothy Allison toured the country earlier this year and was shocked to learn that her Oklahoma City appearance had been cancelled by local event organizers because she is a lesbian. Southern lesbian and gay writers furthermore face the persistent bi-coastal bias inherent in almost all cultural and intellectual production in this country. Much remains to be done so that the experiences of those living outside New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles can be disseminated and the diversity of lesbian and gay cultures in America can be fully represented.

Enter Ellen Spiro. This Richmond transplant to New York has given us the first major work of the visual arts to chronicle the experiences of lesbians and gays across the South. Her new fifty-seven minute video, Greetings from Out Here, is the result of a year-long sojourn through the region. She shot, edited, produced, and directed the documentary, which will be shown in September at sites in Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, and North and South Carolina, as part of the Southern Circuit filmmaker series administered by the South Carolina Arts Commission.

The recipient of numerous awards, many for her video on South Carolina beautician and AIDS educator DiAna DiAna (DiAna’s Hair Ego: AIDS Info Up Front, 29 min., 1990), Spiro broadens her focus in Greetings from Out Here. As she shoots footage of her journey through nine Southern states, Spiro’s goal, she tells us, is to document the lives of those individuals “who don’t flee, but who stay home and do the bravest thing of all—be who they are, where they are.” In her attempt “to explore Southern gay subcultures and to find people who stayed in their small towns instead of joining the anonymous masses of the big cities,” she has created a work of some significance and power. She has provided a forum for a host of lesbian and gay Southerners who otherwise might never have shared their stories.

Early on, the audience meets Isis, an African-American lesbian living in a converted bus in a wooded section of the Ozark Mountains. Despite her Baptist upbringing and her mother’s intense religiosity (“She used to have a wonderful sense of humor before she became a born-again”), Isis does not feel chastised for her sexuality nor compelled to leave Arkansas: “My family doesn’t mind that I’m gay. I’m just supposed to be gay at home. I’m not supposed to be fifteen hundred miles away from family.” Though we meet none of her friends, it seems Isis has a social network of sorts that allows for an expanded definition of family: “There’s blood family, the family that you were born into, and then there’s heart family. And for me, anybody who’s gay that I hear about, I consider them family—just loosely related family.”

Over in north Mississippi, Spiro talks with John Blansett, a young white man living with AIDS in Okolona. Blansett explains how his diagnosis enabled him to more fully come out of the closet, to acknowledge his sexuality, and to be more truthful with friends and neighbors about his illness:

I don’t wear a shirt that says I’m gay, but I don’t lie about it. And at the same time I decided not to call AIDS cancer when I got it …. It’s HIV, it’s a disease, it’s an epidemic that’s sweeping this country. And my little brothers shouldn’t have to get it because somebody didn’t want to talk about it. I mean that is the stupidest reason I can think of for somebody getting sick.

Blansett adds that he knows of four people who have died of AIDS in Okolona.

Content to let Southerners be seen in their daily rituals, to let them share their personal histories, and to let their actions speak to the uniqueness of the Southern gay experience, Spiro rarely probes her subjects thoughts and seldom asks them to examine their region and compare it with others. Yet at the Rhythmfest women’s festival in the mountains of north Georgia, a twenty-something white lesbian explains the geo-politics of female gender conformity:

It is kind of true about the South [that] women tend to be a little more feminine in their ways, in their image. And I like that. I think that’s great. But I think that there’s not as much acceptance of people who are, maybe, more androgynous.

Such observations ultimately are subjective though nonetheless significant. They point to the need for more serious, comparative regional analysis within studies of sexuality in America. Spiro’s work must be seen as intro-

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ductory and exploratory, proof of her thesis that lesbians and gays can and do live meaningful lives in the South. And as Atlanta Pride participant Duncan Teague tells us, sporting pearls and rhinestone-studded, cat-eye sunglasses, “This isn’t a New York thing. This is not San Francisco. This is Atlanta, Georgia. And no you don’t have to pack up and move to San Francisco to be gay.”

In truth, Spiro’s notion of the South is a romantic, pastoral one, which colors her perceptions and distorts her analysis. Ostensibly in search of lesbians and gays who “invent their own lives outside of big urban support systems,” she tellingly does much of her filming in the large cities of Texas, in Atlanta and New Orleans. If her mission primarily is to “explore Southern gay subcultures”—this remains rather unclear—she must necessarily look to these urban centers where the vast majority of lesbian and gay Southerners live and work. The South is not so different in this regard from any other part of the country. While lesbians and gays can (and should) be found (and filmed) on farms and in hamlets in every state of the Union, rural to urban migration has largely shaped gay experience across the country, and that is no less true below the Mason-Dixon. Spiro would better serve her subjects by acknowledging this historical pattern and explicitly addressing its effects in the South. She could then do more than simply juxtaposing images of country life against pictures from the largest of Southern cities. A more balanced composite of the lesbian and gay South not only would include portraits of the likes of John Blansett, but also would contain group shots of his rural Mississippi friends who migrated to small and medium-sized cities like Jackson and Memphis; Tennessee hill people who moved to Nashville and Knoxville; Alabamians who clustered in Birmingham and Mobile; and Carolinians who built communities in Columbia and Charleston, Charlotte and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area.

As if her project were not already broad enough in scope, Spiro rather self-indulgently sets up her video as “an attempt to look at the Southern world that formed me.” Now a “full-fledged gay activist” in New York, Spiro tries to make of her film a personal quest of discovery, a Kerouacian road story. Thus we are made privy to random observations about her ex-girlfriend. We trudge along with her on more than one occasion to see a mechanic about her failing VW bus. And we view constant self-referential shots of Spiro catching her own reflection—in the rear-view mirror, in DiAna’s styling mirror, in the vanity of her room at a cheesy motor lodge, in the windshield of a wrecked car, in her passenger-side window, in storefront windows, and, as John Blansett soberly discusses employment discrimination in Mississippi, in his aquarium.

Furthermore, we are subjected to a postmodern barrage of images of equally questionable relevance. While obviously intended to keep the audience laughing (at whose expense, one might ask), Spiro’s choices seem flip and gratuitous, often trading on stereotype. We see funny road signs-one crudely lettered “Booger Hollow Tabernacle,” another advertising “Front End Alignment / 16.95 / most cars / Jesus Saves.” Spiro points out a Dollywood billboard with a larger than life depiction of Ms. Parton. Ever alert to innuendo, she spots markers for Gaywood Camp Ground and the Homochitto River, the welcome sign to Beaver, Arkansas, and two street signs at the corner of Camp and Cherry. From the opening shot of Herefords grazing to Spiro’s condescending reparteewith an Elvis car tag salesman, the video becomes a discourteous and distanced portrayal, filled with caricature and parody.

Most troubling of all, Greetings from Out Here could easily be interpreted as further marginalizing the very subjects Spiro wishes to chronicle. While clearly honoring those individuals courageous enough to be out here, that is, out of the closet in the South, her title also underscores the assertion that we gay Southerners live out here—outside the “mainstream” gay world, in the boonies, in the hinterlands, away from the gay cultural capitals. Wandering the backroads of a seemingly foreign land, Spiro comes off as a bewildered tourist as her prominent postcard motif revealingly suggests. Her images are like vacation snapshots, varied but depthless. The residents of her travel destinations, the natives, are never fully understood, quickly bypassed as the stranger presses onward.

A dizzyingly ambitious project, Greetings from Out Here takes on too much. Limited within its one-hour time frame, this ground-breaking work inevitably fails to examine Southern lesbian and gay cultures with adequate depth. Large groups of people (Latinos in Texas, Cajuns in Louisiana, Asian-Americans throughout the South) go ignored, while significant cultural centers are allowed scant minutes of explication. Short Mountain Sanctuary, for example—the Tennessee rural retreat where several Radical Faeries make their home and several hundred non-residents converge twice a year—merits a feature-length or book-length study of its own. A region-wide synthesis, which Spiro admirably attempts, is almost impossible given the paucity of background work done in the area—community studies, biographies, oral histories, and the like. This dilemma may soon, in part, be remedied. As successive generations of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgenderal Southerners mature, recent experience suggests that a host of political feats and cultural products is forthcoming.

A native of Brandon, Mississippi, John Howard is a doctoral student in American Studies at Emory University. He is the editor of Carryin’ On: An Anthology of Southern Lesbian and Gay History, forthcoming from New York University Press.