Expense Account Insights on the South

...I confess I’ve played my part in this, having written two stories for a London newspaper about two Southern towns, one called Tallulah, in Louisiana, the other Social Circle, in Georgia...

...In fact, I wonder if he had ever been to the South at all when he wrote that between Virginia and Georgia “lies a vast plain of mediocrity, stupidity, lethargy, almost of dead silence,” ‘Good copy, Good copy' So my friend in the oyster bar, by now tackling a bowl of gumbo, was undoubtedly doing well by the standards of his eminent forerunners...

...And if a few Tocquevillian fantasies are indulged in as the reporter peers out at the natives over the tops of the hedgerows-or, more likely, through the clouds-it probably won’t do any harm...

...The dollars we spend on air conditioners go to out-of-state industries anyway,” the writer noted, “and the ban would promote the resurgence of local industries for making ceiling fans, kitchen exhaust fans, screens and 1 0-foot windows...

...I already shudder at the prospect of encountering hundreds of acres of coverage of next year’s presidential candidates, their peregrinations, and repetitive speeches reported in copious detail...

...Sheldon Hackney, recently appointed president of Tulane University, writing in the American Scholar, discovered a “counterculture” in the South...

...He had also visited the British consul there, who ‘had told him that the secret to the post-World War I1 rejuvenation of the South was air conditioning...

...He, of course, was paying the bill-and sending it back to London...

...Scene: A roadside store in Virginia, selling everything from rakes to hams...

...How to write about something which, when last heard from, no longer existed...

...The messengers returned-several times...

...But then he proceeded to make a concession that may have been truer than he knew...

...Look,” I said, as we settled comfortably around trays of oysters, bowls of gumbo, and frosted mugs of draught beer...

...Within a year or two of his death, Phase 111 began: the New South...

...John Fischer, writing from the “Easy Chair” at Harper’s, is optimistic, too, particularly about the South Carolina Appalachian Council of Governments and the Atlanta Regional Commission, which reminded him of the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council in Minnesota...

...In that event the New South will undoubtedly be a final reality and Mr...

...I twisted some lemon onto an oyster and awaited his story...

...Geographically it’s still there, of course, but the racialproblem idea which everyone thinks of when you say ‘the South’ doesn’t really exist any more...

...Jon Nordheimer of The New York Times found that “The ‘New South’ Is No Longer a Slogan...

...He speaks with this strange foreign accent, so that the farmers don’t really understand what it is he’s saying exactly...

...Phase 11, beginning after Emancipation, lasted for the next hundred years...

...For this they would, of course, need an artist to do the cover portrait...

...I was curious to find out how much time, if any, de Tocqueville spent in New Orleans on his famous journey to America in 1831-32...

...A media event...

...In the South, I wrote, “Negro rights have become black demands,” aware as I did so of the danger inherent in the generalization from an incident in one town...

...Coverage of the South has fallen into three broad periods, I’ve decided...

...H. L. Mencken is another early case in point...

...Three or four farmers are clustered together inside, talking about what is really on their mind, namely the price of corn or the price of tobacco...

...He had been in the South for a full month already, winding his wai through obscure parts of North Carolina and Georgia and so on, even staying in one small town for a week or so...

...The caller is a journalist, or a writer of some kind...

...At least one person who has come to New Orleans writing about the South has confided to me that the main object of the exercise, after all, was to get out from behind that desk in Washington for a week or so, travel about, and file a story or two to justify the bill...

...They may really have been as open-minded as it is possible to be when you enter for the first time a strange region, which you have heard and read so much about...

...Of course...

...The Angle Threatened and Saved Thoughts such as these flickered across my mind when I read Jules Witcover’s description of the National Governors Conference in New Orleans early in June...

...Now as he went on talking, I realized that there was something unusual about his experience...

...assigned by editors who are motivated largely by fear-that if they don’t get the story (if there is one) then the competition might...

...Let me digress with a brief anecdote on this point...

...Consider a few recent variations on the theme...

...And remember that New Orleans was a much more important Southern (and American) city then, in those pre-Houston, pre-Atlanta days...

...The journalist should be wary, of course, of imagining that he or she is going to discover anything as grandiose as “the mood of the country,” or even of “the South,” if that is the direction he heads in...

...It was a convenient state of affairs for journalists, who found that they could see in the South whatever they wanted to see, tell it the way they saw it: Carter (things are getting better), or Wallace (no they’re not...

...By 1970 the phrase (which itself was not new, having been introduced in the Reconstruction Period) was being bandied about in the magazines...

...Witcover’s piece, published in Rolling Stone, took great umbrage at such easy targets as “the oil interests” who were picking up the tab for this or that entertainment...

...He needs an “angle...

...He told me that before arriving he had spent a pleasant day in Atlanta, where a bank president had arranged for him to be flown around the city in a helicopter...

...And who is picking up his tab, I wondered...

...He leaves, and they resume their discussion of the corn crop...

...Such stories often tend to mislead readers into thinking that things are a good deal more important than they really are...

...This was in June, 1975...

...The bumper stickers of today’s South are likely to be more concerned with keeping peace with the environment than fighting dead wars...

...This seems to have provoked a new militancy among blacks and a rash of arson ensued...

...There is no South anymore...

...Was not this “New South” thing merely a matter of cosmetics...

...Governors like Dale Bumpers of Arkansas and Jimmy Carter of Georgia were drawn to our a t t e n t i o n . But-then-again-on-theotherhand . . . there was still James Eastland in Mississippi, George Wallace in Alabama...

...Slavery unified the region, and in fact gave rise to the concept of “the South” as meaning something more than a mere geographical corner of the country...

...To talk to the air conditioning experts, of course...

...But I knew I had the air conditioning idea up my sleeve...

...It needs something equivalently widespread, like slavery, to give it meaning...

...Tom Bethell is a New Orleans journalist who will be joining the staff of The Washington Monthly this fall...

...In the end Rockmore did a great portrait of Jimmy Carter, but, it appears, not sufficiently Kennedy-like...

...The story is usually written and published, and the expenses are paid...

...Hence, the South doesn’t exist...

...Southern Voices lasted for only four issues, but in that time it managed to give the impression that the South is inhabited mainly by scoundrels, with just a few sensitive souls, most of whom wrote for Southern Voices...

...Of course,” he said, “I imagine that you could find whatever story you wanted to find, if you set out to look for it...

...I agreed to meet him and his girlfriend at a seafood place in downtown New Orleans, having already thought up the angle I thought he should use...

...Quite a shock...

...It might, of course, pose problems should the paper feel the need for a fifth story about the South...

...That’s one problem...

...By God, maybe the South will save us all...

...The Tallulah story was about resistance to school integration and the setting up of private schools, (“Little has changed...

...So they puzzle on it for a minute or two, and then perhaps old Jack will say, “I don’t know...

...Meanwhile, as I say, journalists have been ringing the changes...

...New angles on the South are getting hard to find these days, but I try to think of something...

...Meanwhile I was thinking about my upcoming air conditioning piece, when I came across a rather shocking column in the New Orleans StutesItem by architectural columnist Jack Davis, recommending that air conditioning be outlawed in Louisiana...

...At that point another artist was brought in to put the message across...

...Phase 111 was well and truly launched...

...Expense-Accoun t Insights No doubt most of the conflicting impressions recorded herein are true as far as they go (although I lean towards the Nordheimer and Scott interpretations myself), all of which goes to show the danger inherent in using as generalized a conception as “the South” as the subject of a sentence...

...A person in the news business does need to get away from the desk from time to time...

...So was his girlfriend, whose beer mug faltered in its upward journey towards her lips as I spoke...

...We discussed, classified, unclassified for an hour and noon was smiling upon us when we finally adopted the following plan: we resolved to consecrate two hours to an examination of the city...

...Phase I1 ended, it now seems clear, with the assassination of Martin Luther King...

...Already...

...Less hopeful, though, has been Southern Voices, a publication put out by the Southern Regional Council, an organization largely dedicated to the proposition that the South and unfairness are practically synonyms...

...The moment we left Washington and got into Virginia,” he said, “we found that we only had to get out of the car andgo inside some place, restaurant or store or whatever, and people would immediately bring up the subject of race...

...nor by interstate...

...But the author’s blurb made my heart sink: “Jules Witcover, a ‘Washington Post’ political writer, is currently working on a book about the 1976 political campaign...

...Peter Schrag, writing for Saturday Review, found a “Last Frontier...

...Still not quite right, Rockmore would be told, and the tiny hint would be dropped: “There’s quite a resemblance to the Kennedys, don’t you think...

...Maybe the South contains the real American future...

...It is much more usual for correspondents to spend two or three days in the area, at best, which brings me to another digression...

...My English visitor and his girlfriend may well have imagined that they motored down into Virginia wi-th open minds...

...Next item on my agenda: a trip to Houston...

...The man they chose was a good friend of mine named Noel Rockmore...

...There is another that I already have hinted at...

...A good deal of this will be “obligatory,” i.e...

...We haven’t found that anywhere else in America...

...The fact of the matter is that the South has risen...

...What do you think, Bill...

...But, as I could see, my man was unhappy about my proposal...

...Newspapers are tolerant of this procedure when times are flush, and in a way it’s justifiable...

...He spots the farmers...

...A conscientious reader trying to keep up with what was going on in the South might well have been puzzled by the conflicting reports...

...Oh, I must say we haven’t found that at all,’’’ my man said...

...Being a good reporter, he thinks to get a quote or two for his story...

...Poverty, racism, an uncertain economic future, the shriveling of our civic culture,” he says, “are magnified in the South...

...The Social Circle story was about a peculiar incident in which a young black man had been spotted slipping in through the side door of a white divorcee’s house, nightly, and was later shot in the back by an unknown assailant...

...I hear him say, and I can complete the sentence for him...

...I am imagining this (like Mencken...

...The South is about half the size of Europe, after all, and it is far more diverse than many people seem to imagine...

...I don’t think they’re ready for it, myself...

...Grunwald’s artistic judgment will have been, in one sense, vindicated...

...Portrait sessions followed (Noel spilled India ink on the Governor’s carpet, but Carter didn’t seem to mind), and then Rockmore flew on to Time’s editorial offices in New York...

...This phase, as is well known, culminated in an approximately 14-year period of unusual news interest, caused by the federal government’s decision beginning in 1954 to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment (“nor deny to any person withn its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws...

...One thing they know for sure is that he’s not here to ask them about the corn crop or the tobacco crop...

...It’s gone with the wind, so to speak...

...My friend, having stopped for gas, comes in for cigarettes...

...Some time after that a correspondent from the same London paper came to New Orleans and wrote a third story, which ingeniously avoided contradicting anything I had written...

...This was what might be called the “New New South’’ variation, sometimes seen in American publications but not yet deployed in London...

...I have my doubts as to whether Mencken left Baltimore for even five minutes to write this piece...

...I was delighted to find that he had been here less than 24 hours...

...In his famous diatribe about an alleged lack of culture in the South, “The Sahara of the Bozart,” he shared trenchant observations such as one that, “there are no committees down there cadging subscriptions for orchestras,” and more of the same...

...I made a mental note of this as having very interesting possibilities for still another, and entirely original, story about the South...

...Between Virginia and Georgia was just where he had been, and not by airplane, either...

...It is my impression that a good deal of the sort of coverage I have described is done mainly to justify expense-paid traveling...

...But some of it will be voluntary-carried out by reporters who are, in effect, on vacation...

...writing something about the South...

...In the notebooks he kept (far more interesting, I think, than the boiled down generalizations about democracy he arrived at after letting his observations “simmer” for a year or two), he noted the brevity of his visit self-deprecatingly: “We created principles of observation,” he wrote, “then we made deductions from our principles...

...Pretty soon they’re talking about busing, and my man smiles and thinks to himself, “Good copy, good copy...

...But I ask you to visualize the scene...

...It was the condition of the former slavesthe racial issue...

...But he will no doubt be refreshed by the travel...

...Gumbo and Sympathy Then, not long ago, a man arrived planning yet another story on the South for the same newspaper...

...I want to bring up de Tocqueville, a very reliable touchstone for journalists writing about almost any aspect of America...

...Rockmore lost no time in getting on the plane to Atlanta...

...In fact, this period is still continuing, although the debate as to whether there really is a new South is getting rather stale by now...

...Early in 197 1, Time decided to do a cover story on Jimmy Carter, the new governor of Georgia...

...but they understand all too clearly that he’s one of those news media people and that he’s asking them something about “the South,” which is an abstraction they normally don’t think about ,very much...

...It needs, as I say, a new angle...

...Phase I was the period of slavery...

...It’s a Description...

...Moreover, the debate will be decisively terminated if Wallace runs as a third party candidate next year and yet fails to carry the Deep South states, as seems quite possible...

...The only people who are likely to be misled are the readers...

...But then again, Austin Scott wrote in The Washington Post that “a lot of blacks are saying the South is America’s New Frontier, the Land of Opportunity...

...Journalistically, however, the story was simply a new variation on the same theme...

...It’s very simple...

...Then I heaved a sigh of relief when I saw that I had my lead: “Despite a recent proposal that air conditioners be outlawed in New Orleans,” I would begin, “it may fairly be argued that in the South recently...

...About that, of course, I was saying nothing...

...The correspondent had some complicated economic angle which I did not fully understand, but I wasn’t arguing with him...

...Variations on a Theme Journalists can come to the South and find whatever they’re looking for, of that there is no doubt...

...Potential cover portraits of Carter were handed to aides, who then tbok them to an inner sanctum where the managing editor, Henry Grunwald, looked them over...

...But Chandler Davidson, a sociology teacher at Rice, found only “New Politics in the Old South” for the Nation some months later...

...In front is a gas pump...

...but it may not be so far from the truth...