Books in Brief: South-Watching

South-Watching, by Gerald W. Johnson, edited, with an introduction, by Fred Hobson (University of North Carolina, 207 pp., $8.95). In 1920 H. L. Mencken wrote an essay entitled “The Sahara of the Bozart” that accused the South of artistic, intellectual, and cultural sterility. He called the land below the Mason-Dixon line “an awe-inspiring blank,” a “gargantuan paradise of the fourth-rate,” a region with a “depressing lack of all civilized gesture and aspiration,” a land where “free inquiry is blocked by the idiotic certainties of ignorant men.” He continued, “It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now-mythical ether.” Gerald W. Johnson, a North Carolina journalist, felt compelled to respond, and in 1928 produced an essay of his own, saying in part, “The South is not sterile. On the contrary, it is altogether too luxuriant. It is not the Sahara, but the Congo of the Bozart.” Johnson became a protege of Mencken, wrote for The American Mercury, and in 1925 quit the South for the Baltimore Sun papers. In South-Watching, Fred Hobson, a professor at the University of Alabama and author of Serpent in Eden: H. L. Mencken and the South, collects 22 of Johnson’s essays on the region. Johnson, a Southern liberal who died in 1980, knew that for Southern culture to revive it would have to shed the bogus protectionism that had grown after Appomattox. This meant criticism, by a Southerner and from within.’And so Johnson laid about him, smashing the Klan, the misty-eyed Lost Cause Agrarians, evangelists, journalists, and politicians. At the same time, he mounted a defense of cotton-mill owners, liberals, and educators. He described the job of rebuilding the South: “The theory that every honest man owes obedience to the law, respect to the courts, and support to the institutions of popular government has been challenged in the South; and the fight to re-establish it has been the main concern of the best minds of the section for two generations.” And of course he analyzed race and Southern politics. Johnson was influenced by Southern economist Broadus Mitchell as well as by H. L. Mencken; he in turn influenced W. J. Cash, who perhaps had the last word, in the now-classic The Mind of the South (1941). With South-Watching, Mr. Hobson has done another thorough job of elaborating upon an important American literary footnote.

JM

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South-Watching, by Gerald W. Johnson, edited, with an introduction, by Fred Hobson (University of North Carolina, 207 pp., $8.95). In 1920 H. L. Mencken wrote an essay entitled “The Sahara of the Bozart” that accused the South of artistic, intellectual, and cultural sterility. He called the land below the Mason-Dixon line “an awe-inspiring blank,” a “gargantuan paradise of the fourth-rate,” a region with a “depressing lack of all civilized gesture and aspiration,” a land where “free inquiry is blocked by the idiotic certainties of ignorant men.” He continued, “It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now-mythical ether.” Gerald W. Johnson, a North Carolina journalist, felt compelled to respond, and in 1928 produced an essay of his own, saying in part, “The South is not sterile. On the contrary, it is altogether too luxuriant. It is not the Sahara, but the Congo of the Bozart.” Johnson became a protege of Mencken, wrote for The American Mercury, and in 1925 quit the South for the Baltimore Sun papers. In South-Watching, Fred Hobson, a professor at the University of Alabama and author of Serpent in Eden: H. L. Mencken and the South, collects 22 of Johnson’s essays on the region. Johnson, a Southern liberal who died in 1980, knew that for Southern culture to revive it would have to shed the bogus protectionism that had grown after Appomattox. This meant criticism, by a Southerner and from within.’And so Johnson laid about him, smashing the Klan, the misty-eyed Lost Cause Agrarians, evangelists, journalists, and politicians. At the same time, he mounted a defense of cotton-mill owners, liberals, and educators. He described the job of rebuilding the South: “The theory that every honest man owes obedience to the law, respect to the courts, and support to the institutions of popular government has been challenged in the South; and the fight to re-establish it has been the main concern of the best minds of the section for two generations.” And of course he analyzed race and Southern politics. Johnson was influenced by Southern economist Broadus Mitchell as well as by H. L. Mencken; he in turn influenced W. J. Cash, who perhaps had the last word, in the now-classic The Mind of the South (1941). With South-Watching, Mr. Hobson has done another thorough job of elaborating upon an important American literary footnote.