North Carolina Office of Archives and History

Southern Writers and the New South Movement, 1865-1913 by Wayne MixonReview by: Ray M. AtchisonThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 58, No. 2 (April, 1981), pp. 200-201Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23534747 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 07:27

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

North Carolina Office of Archives and History is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to The North Carolina Historical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.216 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 07:27:46 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

200 Book Reviews

trusted persons who dealt with intangibles, such as credit and interest, and re sented city dominance over the countryside.

On the other hand, Populists did not oppose industrialism. Instead, they wel comed the appearance of railroads and factories. Their quarrel was with social

consequences of industrialism and its dehumanizing effect. One dilemma they never resolved—how to retain the material benefits of industrialism and at the same time preserve the values of their Protestant, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian heri

tage which industrialism threatened. Their objectives, embodied in the Omaha platform of 1892, envisioned aboli

tion of land monopoly, government ownership of railroads, telephone and tele»

graph companies, and monetary and financial reforms. They divided into two

groups. The moderates favored free silver and fusion with the Democrats. The radical element advocated antimonopoly greenbackism and became mid-roaders

(non-fusionists). This faction advocated all Populist reforms including unre deemable paper currency.

The author discusses the political experiences of Populists in four southern states. In North Carolina and Alabama the free silverites dominated. In Texas the antimonopoly advocates triumphed. Georgia Populists pursued a middle course between fusionist and mid-roaders. The author concludes that the col

lapse of Populism meant the end of southern efforts to "overcome their sectional

history and habits and join other American reformers in the creation of a truly national identity."

Most of this work is devoted to an analysis of Populist ideology, although the last two of twelve chapters are narrative treatments of Populist political develop ments. It is rich in original concepts. Comprehension of the material requires careful and intensive reading. The story begins perhaps too abruptly in 1891. The general reader would benefit from some information on the developments that led to Populism. The author has relied heavily on newspapers in his research and has also utilized extensive manuscript collections.

East Carolina University

Lala Carr Steelman

Southern Writers and the New South Movement, 1865-1913. By Wayne Mixon. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, index. Pp. x, 169. Cloth, $13.00; paper, $8.00.)

A very provocative new book which focuses upon the creative writers of the New South appears under the aegis of the Departments of History and Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Written in a remark ably clear style by an assistant professor of history at Mercer University, the vol ume surveys divergent attitudes of twelve significant writers of the period 1865 to 1913.

An introduction sets forth the basic creed of the New South movement: sec tional reconciliation, racial accommodation, and industrialization. The writers are discussed in ten chapters grouped according to three major divisions: (I) older writers such as Paul Hamilton Hayne and John Esten Cooke who sought accom modation but fell back upon ideals of the Old South; (II) literary proponents, in

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.216 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 07:27:46 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews 201

eluding Thomas Dixon, Jr., and Will N. Harben; and (III) opponents, such as

Sidney Lanier, Joel Chandler Harris, and Ellen Glasgow. Selected poems and novels of the writers, together with recent criticisms, form most of the bibliog

raphy from which Mixon draws his own conclusions. The epilogue briefly summarizes the preceding chapters and emphasizes the

thesis that "The opponents of the new industrial ideology sustained the pastoral tradition in Southern letters and bequeathed it to the more talented writers of the

Southern Literary Renascence beginning in the 1920s."

Readers of this volume are not likely to quibble with Mixon's classification of

the twelve writers. Perhaps they will respond more readily to his strong stance

that "The greatest debt of the Renascence was to the opponents of the New South

movement." Mixon is not the first critic to establish a definite link between the

New South writers and the twentieth-century Agrarians. His mentors at Chapel Hill—Professors Holman and Rubin—had already begun this investigation.

Mixon's fuller treatment, however, is timely since the three remaining Agrar ians (Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytel, Lyle Lanier) recently held a reunion

and gave lectures at Vanderbilt University (see Time, December 8, 1980). Their

discussions and Professor Mixon's perceptive book-length study doubtless will

help to draw rapt attention again to the ever recurring theme of industrial en

croachment upon a once pastoral South.

Samford University

Ray M. Atchison

The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Con stitutions in the Revolutionary Era. By Willi Paul Adams. Translated by Rita and Robert Kimber. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of

Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1980. Foreword, preface, appendixes, bibliography, index. Pp. xviii, 351. $23.50.)

Some of the most perceptive insights into American history and character have

come from outsiders who have viewed this nation and its people with some sense

of detachment. This fine study of the Revolutionary era was made by a professor of North American history at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American

Studies, Free University of Berlin. It received the 1976 American Historical Asso

ciation award for the best scholarly work on the Revolutionary period written in a

language other than English. Other scholars have studied the topics covered in

this work, and specialists in the period will find little that is startling. But it is an

excellent synthesis that will be useful even to specialists; it merits the award that

it has received. Adams's intellectual history of the Revolution concentrates upon the develop

ment of republican ideology as the colonies transformed themselves into states,

but it also notes the application of the major concepts to the early efforts to form

a national government. The states' experience was especially important, he

maintains, because "Essentially, the basic structure of the Federal Constitution

of 1787 was that of certain of the existing state constitutions writ large. . . . The

constitution did not represent a counterrevolution or a restoration, as is sometime

claimed, but simply the extension of centralizing tendencies that had existed

since the beginning of the war for independence."

VOLUME LVI11, NUMBER 2, APRIL, 1981

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.216 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 07:27:46 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions