Metro Pulse/Gamut/The Old North

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Is Aping Yankees What Makes the South Southern?

by Jack Neely

I get unsolicited chain email every day, as you do. Most of these communiqués are jokes or true facts that some friend of a friend thought was funny or remarkable or true. Many are adages I saw on bathroom walls during the Ford administration. I delete most of them with all the other spam.

Some of them are comparison lists, in which the characteristics of one recognizable personality type are compared with corresponding characteristics of another personality type. Often these lists are male-vs.-female things. "Women: Cook Food." "Men: Eat Food." People love that sort of stuff. They read it and say, "That reminds me of Uncle Bob. That's what he does, he eats food."

My index finger rarely tarries on its way to the delete key. But one particular comparison e-mail was a North versus South thing. I read it with more interest than usual. There were about 20 separate items, comparing various observations about the habits of either side. One, for example, pointed out that a wait for a football ticket is five days in the North, but five months in the South. Most of the items, I found, were variations on the perceived attribute that the South is far more football-crazy than the North. Also, a couple of the items suggested that Southern women are much more likely to use profanity than Northern women. According to the list, a Northern woman's comment is "My, this is certainly a violent sport." Meanwhile, the presumably earthier Southern woman's parallel comment is "Dammit, you slow sumbitch—tackle him and break his legs."

That joke letter, from Chapel Hill, N.C., had gotten around, and I saw several comments from people in Knoxville, wholeheartedly endorsing it. If I were a normal, healthy Southern male, I would have typed in, "Yeah, bud! You got that right." Then I would have emailed it to several hundred of my closest friends.

But I didn't. Something about it bugged me, and I brooded about it. Finally I realized what should have been obvious from the beginning, that there was something very odd about those juxtapositions. See, the two attributes which someone took to be most representative of the South in 2003—football mania and profane women—are nearly the opposite of how they would have been presented in a previous era.

It was once the North that was college-football-crazy: Boolah-boolah, win one for the Gipper, and all that. The stereotypical pennant-waving American football fan would have been uncomfortable in his raccoon coat on most Saturdays in the South.

Football's a Northern sport, after all. The first football club was in Massachusetts, ca. 1862. The first college football game was in New Jersey, Princeton vs. Rutgers, 1869. The game's rules were first formalized in New York in 1873. In those days, Southerners didn't know a pigskin from a sheepskin. The only sports Southerners cared much about were billiards, poker, horseracing, cockfighting, and that new Yankee game, baseball.

We couldn't be expected to get the hang of more than one Yankee game at a time. Football stayed in the North for a generation or so before it gripped Tennessee; UT didn't even field a club team until the 1890s. Southerners used to make fun of Yankees because they were so rah-rah boolah-boolah nutty about college football.

And sometime back in the 20th century—I swear I remember this right—it was the Northern women who were much more likely to cuss. My mother told me that fact when I was very small, to watch out for Northern women because they cussed. For years I found it to be true. I grew up in Tennessee, and never heard a woman cuss until I was in college in the 1970s. I remember the occasion, and the word, vividly because it astonished me so. At first it was just one, the token frizzy-haired Phi Mu from Jersey. Later on, when I worked at Whittle Communications in the '80s, the female cussers in my life proliferated; the great majority of them were from Massachusetts, New York, Ohio. If I were to list the first 20 women I ever heard say a deletable word, 18 of them, possibly 19, were Northerners.

Things have changed. Now, according to the Internet, it seems that Southerners, and Southern women in particular, cuss even more than Northerners. It is, in fact, one of a Southern woman's defining characteristics.

If it were just one suspect email, I wouldn't have bothered writing an essay about it. But I started wondering if there was some more comprehensive syndrome at work here. The Republican Party's grip on the south is even stranger than the football-and-cussing criteria. Wasn't the Republican Party formed for the purpose of opposing the South? It was fear of the Republican Party, in fact, that caused the South to secede and start the bloodiest war in American history. Knoxville Republicans may celebrate gala Lincoln Day dinners now, but in 1860, Abe wasn't even allowed on the ballot in Tennessee, or in most regionally patriotic Southern states. The Solid South was named that because it was solidly Democratic.

So, today our women cuss, we make a much bigger deal of college football, and we vote Republican. All that's legal, as far as I know. But can that be what makes them distinctly Southern?

Considering these paradoxes, this tenth-generation Southerner began to get a distinctly uncomfortable sensation, a prickly feeling in the back of the neck. At its source was a harrowing conclusion:

Are Southerners mainly people who are trying very hard to be old-fashioned Northerners?

The phenomenon seems to go back a long, long way, and it may have something to do with how the South got to be the Bible Belt. Two centuries ago, when New England was the Bible Belt, the South had a reputation as an unchurched wilderness populated by godless heathens. Knoxville, in particular. In 1810, when it was capital of Tennessee, Knoxville was described with horror (by a Pennsylvania-churched minister) as the only capital city in the world without a single chapel of any denomination. But later, in that respect, the South became more Northern than the North.

A related native of the North was prohibition. The American temperance movement started in Massachusetts in the 1820s. The idea gained some advocates in Tennessee, but they weren't successful in a big way until after Illinois reformer Frances Willard conducted her more than one crusade in Knoxville. She sometimes made the South seem as if it was behind the times—because unlike some progressive Northern communities, we didn't yet have prohibition. Then, of course, the Northern import prohibition gripped the South longer and more thoroughly than it did other regions of the country.

Mirroring an extreme image of what the North sold us became a Southern habit. Look at the automobile. The standard Southern cliché of the rebel flag on the pickup recently provoked ire in the presidential campaign. That Southerners would have cars to hang rebel flags on goes without saying. A Southerner without a car is viewed with suspicion. He may as well be a Communist, or a vegetarian. We could easily forget that the car itself was once a Yankee outrage.

Henry Ford was a Yankee's Yankee, as were most of his colleagues in the early automobile industry; their products were an instant sensation up yonder. But for years, automakers had a hard time interesting Southerners in automobiles. In 1910, there were far more cars per capita in the North than in the South.

The South's early indifference to the automobile was perplexing to some marketers. Some folks, of course, just couldn't afford them. But quite a few Southerners actively disapproved of the "Yankee machines," and spoke of Chevrolet salesmen as their parents had spoken of carpetbaggers. As late as the 1930s, hardcore Southern advocates like Nashville's Fugitive authors of the classic conservative tome, I'll Take My Stand, were resisting the automobile, as if it was a present threat to everything that made the South Southern. The Southern way of life was, at its essence, self-reliant, non-mechanized, rooted to the land, beholden to no other region or country. The Yankee machine threatened to undermine our independence, to make the South just like the North.

In his 1930 essay, "The Hind Tit," young Tennessee author Andrew Nelson Lytle wrote about the early automobile marketers' inroads into the South. Lytle, a scholar of the Confederate South, described the automobile as the robber of the Southern man's independence. He believed car salesmen were part of a conspiracy to enslave the Southerner to Yankee interests: auto manufacturers, loaning institutions, and oil companies.

The Yankee machine caught on here anyway. And like college football, the Republican Party, and fundamentalism, it caught on bigger in the South than in its homeland. That seems to be a theme here: the South takes Northern ideas and blows them up into gigantic proportions undreamt of by the Yankee originators. If there's anything distinctly Southern in all this, it's that funhouse extremism in imitation.

Today, Southern culture has a Ford V8 engine. It's inseparable from the Yankee machine, from Thunder Road to NASCAR. Southern commuters have become more dependent on the automobile than their counterparts in the North, so much so that Tennessee planners are dispairing of ever interesting us in other forms of transportation—even bicycles and light rail, which, as practical forms of transportation for large numbers of people, have deeper histories in Southern cities like Knoxville than does the automobile. There are now more automobiles per capita in the South than in the North, and we drive them more miles. It's hard to get around the South without a Yankee machine.

Earlier this year, in several Southern markets, there was a truck commercial that went, "Around here, there's only one style, one attitude, one South." Lytle wouldn't have been surprised that Madison Avenue had found a way to hijack Southern Pride. The statement is, of course, a silly lie—the South is full of deviant styles and attitudes and always has been, maybe more so than most other regions—but the North dearly wants the South to believe there's only one attitude, because it would make things simpler for their marketers. Maybe defiant Southern Pride itself is a Yankee invention, an efficient strategy for selling us cars.

A friend once told me there's nothing more Southern than NASCAR. It's a form of racing different from other forms of car racing. In other forms of racing, car bodies are built for speed. What makes NASCAR different from all other kinds of auto racing around the world is its strict, devotional adherence to the body styles of Detroit, Michigan. It's a Southern thing.

Southerners are almost as loyal to the products of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Microbreweries have caught on across the country, as Americans have come to appreciate local beers—but they aren't nearly as popular in the South as they are in the West and North. You can hear the same sad story from former owners of failed microbreweries all over the South, including the award-winning brewers of the now-defunct New Knoxville Brewing Co. For the most part, Southerners have rejected their own home-grown beer to favor their favorite old Northern imports.

Some regional breweries are still bravely making a go of it. But offer a Highlander ale from Asheville to a true mullet-and-ball-cap Southerner, and chances are he will, in a defiant Confederate drawl, insist on a Miller Lite or a PBR.

The North keeps conquering the South over and over. We could observe that the mullet hair style and the ball cap have apparent Northern origins, too. But I think we've gone plenty far enough.

We might start to feel like no-count copycats, if not for the fact that the influence often flows the other way. Sometimes the South marches much farther into the North than Lee ever did. Rock 'n' roll is, by all accounts, a purely Southern creation. Almost all influential rockers before the 1960s were Southerners. But today, Detroit claims to be Rock City, and Cleveland, Ohio, is home to the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. Chicago has grabbed the delta blues as its own. Bluegrass is also a Southern creation, but some local bluegrass performers have remarked that bluegrass seems more popular in the North and West than in the South.

There's a similar phenomenon in literature. Southern writers are often better known in the North than in the South. Tennessee Williams' Deep-South classic, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, is enjoying a popular revival on Broadway.

Iced tea, a Southern tradition, is catching on up north, as is, unaccountably, Krispy Kreme. In the last year or so, articles in the New York Times have remarked on new culinary fads in the Big Apple: barbecue, Hoppin' John and—most unlikely of all—the Southern Appalachian eccentricity, ramps, which appear in a variety of swanky Manhattan dishes each spring. Now they say ramps are easier to find in Northern metropolitan markets than in Southern ones.

And listen up, y'all, while we weren't looking, the once-distinctive Southern accent has been carjacked for service in the rap lyrics of Detroit and New York. American culture, as it's known around the world, is more than half Southern.

There may well be some sort of subversive cultural exchange program going on here. The North is pretending it's Southern, as the South completes its metamorphosis into a wacky funhouse version of the Old North. But you have to wonder whether we're getting the best of the bargain.