Southerners All

In her post at the Washington Post yesterday, Kathleen Parker noted that southerners deserve better than what they get.  She was, however, more specific than that: poor white southerners deserve better.  The gist of her complaint was that the Republican hopefuls (mostly Mitt Romney) needed to stop playing to stereotypes about poor whites in the American South (cheesy grits anyone?).  Since it is one of many posts Parker has made in recent months for Romney to act more like himself, we can probably chalk up her effort to a familiar trope: I live in the South and I'm not like that stereotype.  Funny how one uses a rhetorical move to deflect a different rhetorical move.  Yes, media types play to common denominators, but that is nothing new.  Educated southerners, both black and white, have for the better part of the past two centuries tried to suggest that the South was somehow different from the backwoods-types.  But sad to say, sometimes we need those stereotypes.

H.L. Mencken

For historical context, no media type before or after H.L. Mencken has done more to dirty the water with regard to southern stereotypes of poor whites.  In his letters to family and folks at the Baltimore Sun during the infamous Scopes trial, Mencken noted how erudite his doctor host was.  He commented on how well read the leaders of the town of Cleveland, Tennessee, were.  His daily columns to the Sun, however, told a different, more devastating, story.  The power of evolutionary science and rational thought could not overcome the chasm caused by a religious simpleness.  Mencken knew the difference between fundamentalists (although that term would not be fully defined for another two decades) and "holy rollers," but that did not make a good story so he conflated the characters to highlight the backwardness of poor religious folk.  Except, like media today, Mencken is not solely responsible for the image.  Since the leaders in Cleveland, Tennessee, wanted to create a buzz about their little town and the economic opportunities of tourism, the trial could boost publicity.  Boosterism has often made strange bedfellows with all kinds of suitors.  In Scopes's case, it was strange indeed.  William Jennings Bryan looked feeble and Clarence Darrow buried him long before his actual death shortly after the trial.  Though Scopes was found in violation of the Tennessee law, Tennessee, and by extension the rest of the South, lost the public relation war over backwardness.  We have often invited the  stereotype.  "Holy rollers" make everybody nervous except other pentecostal types, which is why if a hand starts waving in a good white Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian church in the South everybody gets uneasy.  Mencken knew the power of the image.

Returning to Parker for a moment, it appears she needs Romney to win to validate her common-sense, transplanted southern conservatism.  Both Gingrich and Santorum have taken the deep South states from Mitt.  If he gets the nomination, Romney has to explain to these same people who rejected him the first time to vote for him.  The problem is that the Republican base in the South looks a lot more like the image Parker finds so objectionable.  Is it all of us?  Not a chance, but that does not matter because the image projected is the one the Republican base holds on to.  In a remarkably odd moment in southern history, these folks would willingly vote for a wealthy Catholic than mark a ballot for a wealthy Mormon.  In a region where both groups have been hated, Santorum's rhetoric looks more familiar, probably because it is as cafeteria catholic as these people are cafeteria protestants.  If Santorum adhered to the social justice (including labor and capital punishment) end of the Conference of Bishops teachings, these folks would have been caught in a pickle as my grandmother use to say.  And that is the rub for me.  Parker, and the Republican presidential candidates, are not looking out for poor whites.  If they were, they would know that grits are a product of the hard-scrabbled life of farm folk who grow what the earth will give them (funny how no one mentions "greens").  In this way, poor southerners, black and white, have far more in common with each other than with any of the candidates.

Yes, Ms. Parker, southerners, regardless of skin tone, do deserve better.  But the big shame in the past week is not that Romney said cheesy grits or hi y'all, it is that white middle-class southerners, transplant or otherwise, think they understand poor whites and can speak for them, co-opting their images in the process.  Wonder how many poor whites made it to any candidate's rally?  My guess is the answer is zero given that gas costs almost $4.00/gallon in these parts; unless we are counting Mr. Foxworthy and then he was one of many wealthy white men and women making money off of image of poor whites.