Writing
of the value of American cultural diversity in 1957, author Donald
Davidson recognized that it could not flourish “if America was to
subjugated to the ideal of uniformity, or to the ideal universe that
some one section might generate.”
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Destroying Diversity with Uniformity
“Those
of us who still believe in the map of the United States know that it
marks the residence of some diverse Americans who had better not go
unacknowledged. In Vermont, for instance, are people who are still
Yankees; and in Georgia, and elsewhere, there are still Rebels.
I
remember talking with a certain Virginian who watched a Vermont sunset
with me, one summer evening. The woods were as snug and precise as a
Yankee kitchen . . . The streams were orthodox streams, almost model
streams . . . often called “brooks” – a word that for Southerners
existed only on the printed page.
The
forebears of the Vermont Yankee had once failed to understand how
Southerners could be devoted to both slavery and to democracy. That old
failure of understanding did not seem queer, or worth more than a
passing sigh, to two Southerners who stood looking at sunset upon a land
. . . cut to a discreet Yankee pattern.
But
the human geography of America had now become a parti-colored thing,
sprawling across the continent in a crazy quilt of provinces, or
sections, each with its private notion of a universe. No longer, as in
the sixties, could the Yankee make bold and set up a general pattern for
the entire Union. He had enough to do if he would defend and preserve
what was peculiarly his own – his very own, surely, in upper New
England.
In
such a purpose of preservation these two Southerners at last could make
bold to sympathize, even to help if possible. But preservation could
not be achieved without recognizing a principle of diversity in American
life. But how could the principle of diversity be inculcated?
On
the negative side, certain false images, the product of legend or
propaganda, must somehow be counterbalanced. To the Virginian I
recalled the horror of a good lady from the Middle West, who was
motoring from Washington to Richmond. Mount Vernon was all right, she
thought; there the legend was safely frozen. But beyond, on the road to
Richmond, what had become of all the great mansions she had read about,
the cotton fields with Negroes caroling, the old gentlemen in goatees
and white vests, sipping mint juleps in the shade?
They
were not visible. There were only a few scattered shacks and tumbledown
barns in miles of impenetrable wilderness that looked for all the world
as it must have looked when John Smith first invaded it. If she could
have encountered the legend, the lady would have been content. But not
seeing it or knowing how to locate it, she was smitten with a
housewifery desire to get at this ragged land with a good broom and
whisk it into seemliness.
Other
sojourners had been anxious to do a far more drastic tidying up. The
Harlan County visitors, the Scottsboro attorneys, the shock troops of
Dayton and Gastonia asked no questions about genius of place. Wherever
they went on their missions of social justice, they carried with them a
legend of the future, more dangerously abstract than the legend of the
past, and sternly demanded that the local arrangements be made to
correspond with it, at whatever cost.
And
yet the only America that the visitors offered as a model was an
overgrown urban America, forever in process of becoming one laboratory
experiment after another.”
(Still Rebels, Still Yankees, and Other Essays, Donald Davidson, LSU Press, 1957, pp. 232-234)
