Tin Pan Blues |
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Guy Hubbs Responds to Barton Myers' Review of _Guarding Greensboro_: Allow me to begin by thanking H-South for this opportunity to respond to Barton Myers' review of _Guarding Greensboro_. Before moving to larger issues, I want to spend just a few lines addressing some inaccuracies in his review, particularly that I asserted things that I did not (such as that no community exists where individualism is strongest) and that I, curiously, failed to demonstrate what I could not find (an antebellum _gemeinschaft_ community). As to the former, of course individualists create communities, but not of the _gemeinschaft_ sort. This study is in fact largely an argument for a much broader understanding of what communities can be. I suggest a definition something along the lines of social warmth or enduring commitments among those who would otherwise remain apart. I freely admit that this is broad. But communities are relationships among individuals, constantly changing and adapting to new conditions and personalities, and so are endlessly varied and notoriously "slippery." As to the latter criticism, I examined carefully every word I could discover written from Greensboro and found little or nothing approaching Tonnies' notion of _gemeinschaft_ in the years before the war. If one looks closely at the establishment of Southern University in the 1850s, an example used by the reviewer, one finds that the cornerstone ceremony was organized by voluntary associations; postbellum Confederate memorial ceremonies, by contrast, were never organized that way. Rather than look at isolated examples, however, the strength of the argument is to be found in the way that thousands of such events and documents fit together neatly in the way that I described. Of course I particularly liked the generous comments in Myers' concluding paragraph. There he recognizes that the book presents theoretical questions that extend well beyond the nineteenth-century South, in particular questions about the premises on which individuals build communities and the conceptual frameworks by which historians understand them. It is these questions that particularly interest me. This study of Greensboro, Alabama, proceeded from the ground up. I scrounged archives and attics for every scrap of paper written there during the nineteenth century. As I plunged into the lives of hundreds of ordinary people, I came to see that this postage-stamp-of-a-place was far more complex than I had anticipated. These people did not articulate their ideas in learned treatises; they did, nonetheless, vigorously engage in intellectual problems and civic challenges. Their solutions and their actions rested on fundamental premises that I sought to reconstruct, despite the inherent difficulties of dealing with unsophisticated sources. Life on a small scale, I concluded, is an extraordinarily rich resource that warrants our attention. These materials are too often passed over in favor of studying Big People in Big Places. The implicit assumption seems to be that we can just extrapolate downward to the workaday people in Greensboro and thousands of other small towns across America. But analyzing voting records in the Halls of Congress or detailing the tactics of a great commander misses the critical but quiet revolutions in the hamlets and villages throughout the country. I finished this study convinced that a careful look at a small place, when shorn of preconceptions, has the potential to change significantly how we understand Americans both past and present. Nowhere is this more apparent than in community building, and here I ran up against one of those preconceptions: the declension model. Anyone who travels to Greensboro today will wonder if it had been a set for _Gone With the Wind_. Houses on Main Street could be confused for Tara or Twelve Oaks. Historians have rightly blasted _GWTW_ for its patronizing and fanciful depiction of the mid-nineteenth century South. But if the book and movie fail as history, they succeed on an emotional level when portraying the inevitability of community decline. _GWTW_ creates a powerful image of an idyllic era when families lived near to the earth and near to their children, cousins, and friends. Everyone knew each other well, for they had grown up together. Honor and personal virtue were a way of life. "Personal" was the key word here. Life was conducted on an intensely personal basis. Then the war came. Scarlett O'Hara's closely knit community of extended families and reliable neighbors was destroyed. In its place arose a new and competitive world run by money-hungry self-seekers. Scarlett vows to rebuild Tara, but we all know that it will never happen. _GWTW_ resonates because we all know what it is to have others destroy what we hold dear. The Confederates defended their homes from evil Yankee soldiers with their rifled muskets; today we defend our homes from rapacious land developers with their bulldozers. I, too, was prepared to use this declension model on Greensboro. But the more I examined their letters and diaries, the more the town's antebellum years began to look nothing like the mythic closely knit communities of legend. The postbellum years, however, did. Before the war, the town was filled with transients who joined and soon left the many overlapping voluntary and temporary associations organized for specific purposes. The war changed all that by providing white Greensborians, both those at home and those at the front, with a new and encompassing sense of purpose. For four years, Greensborians marched together, ate the same hardtack, slept on the same ground. Some even died for each other. They shared a common goal, a common fate, and emerged from the war with a common story. The closely knit traditional Southern community of legend was at last a reality--but _after_ the war and not before. _Gone With the Wind_ had been turned on its head. The story of Greensboro's first fifty years was not one of a declining community, but of an emerging one. However much nostalgia plays in predisposing us to see communities as declining, nostalgia does not explain it all. Let us instead consider another source, however unlikely: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Yes, Rousseau, the eighteenth-century French philosophe. Simplistically put, Rousseau advances a notion of humankind living blissfully as equals in the State of Nature. Then someone got the notion of private property, and things were never the same. Private property led to covetousness and a corrupt civil society established by the powerful to maintain their domination over the weak. Happiness can be reestablished if only the downtrodden destroy the powerful and return us to our natural Edenic equality. The vast majority of historians are, I suggest, Rousseau's intellectual grandchildren. They may not want to recreate a world before government, they may in fact hold great faith in government, but they do want to isolate and remove the powerful forces--usually associated with race, class, gender, and now religion--that have intruded into our otherwise contented, peaceful, sociable lives. The historian has a particular moral and professional duty to identify those powerful forces in the past whose selfish actions have created today's misery. But what if Rousseau had it exactly backwards? What if humankind's natural condition is not amiable sociability, but solitude and merciless competition?[1] What if communities need less to be rescued than to be created and sustained? What if we look through a microscope instead of a telescope? Southern history--with its archetypical planters, slaves, belles, yeomen, demagogues--is tailor-made for Rousseau's grandchildren. My shelves sag with their studies of how one group exploited another. Let me make clear that I am _not_ in any way trying to dismiss or even downplay the horrors that some have committed against others. I _am_, however, concerned with how historians have treated these horrors; and I am equally concerned with how these horrors have influenced historians. The assumption that identifying the evil doers is the historian's responsibility has created smug, self-congratulatory scholars who rest satisfied in their own moral authority. (Fortunately for us, we will never learn what historians of the twenty-second century will think of our own sins.) And such an assumption has allowed us to quit after having tackled only half the problem: fingering the sources of social divisions. Historians seem far less interested in the more daunting task of understanding how social divisions are overcome, often through community building. People are much more complex than Rousseau or his grandchildren would have it. The same person can do wonderful things and evil things. The same person can belong to multiple communities. And communities are just as complex. Communities can be sources of social warmth and mutual dependence, and they can be sources of exclusion and violence. Communities can be voluntary, and they can be mandatory. Communities can grow, and they can decline. Our world cannot so easily be divided between the righteous and the unrighteous. Complexity suggests that the past is less a morality play than a tragedy. Life constantly fools us--and disappoints us. More than mere irony, this study of Greensboro demonstrates the inherent moral conflicts at the core of the human condition. In the 1860s the end of slavery--a great good--was purchased with the lives of over a half million individuals, not to mention the pain of the widows, wounded veterans, and the fatherless children left behind. In small towns and villages across the South, the creation of closely knit communities--another great good--was purchased by the exclusion of much of the population, by the constant undermining of their dignity and humanity. Former Confederates created something admirable. They also created something terrible. Greensboro's story reminds us how often our successes are purchased at a crushing price. Note [1]. Modern anthropologists would find Rousseau's buoyant description of the State of Nature amusing. See, for example, Nicholas Wade's _Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors_ (Penguin, 2006). Guy Hubbs Birmingham-Southern College Sunday, December 03, 2006
The Spatial Theory of Voting and the Presidential Election of 1824
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