The
years after 1865 saw the family as the core of Southern society and
“within its bounds everything worthwhile took place.” Even in the early
twentieth century Southerners working in exile up North imported corn
meal and cured hams, and missed the North Carolina home where “Aunt
Nancy still measures by hand and taste,” and where “the art of cooking
famous old dishes lives on.”
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"
Endlessly Contemplating the Past on the Front Porch
“The
governing families [of the South] . . . possessed modesty and good
breeding in ample measure; much informal geniality without familiarity; a
marked social distinction that was neither deliberate nor
self-conscious. Indeed, the best families in the South were the most
delightful segment of the American elite.
Southern
charm reached its culmination in the Southern lady, a creature who,
like her plantation grandmother, could be feminine and decorative
without sacrificing any privileges except the masculine prerogative to
hold public office. Count Hermann Keyserling in 1929 was impressed by
“that lovely type of woman called “The Southern Girl,” who, in his
opinion, possessed the subtle virtues of the French lady.
What
at times appeared to be ignorance, vanity or hypocrisy, frequently
turned out to be the innate politeness of the Southerner who sought to
put others at ease.
To
a greater degree than other Americans, Southerners practiced what may
be regarded as the essence of good manners: the idea that the outward
form of inherited or imposed ideals should be maintained regardless of
what went on behind the scenes. Southern ideals were more extensive and
inflexible than those prevailing elsewhere in America. To the rigid
code of plantation days was added, in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the repressions of puritanism imposed by the
Protestant clergy, who demanded that the fiddle be silenced and strong
drink eschewed “on pain of ruin in this world and damnation in the
next.”
Although
Southerners were among the hardest drinkers in America, one reason they
voted for Al Smith in 1928 was because he openly defended drinking.
Many critics called this attitude hypocrisy, even deceit; the
Southerners, however, insisted upon making the distinction between
hedonistic tendencies and long-established ideals. If such evasiveness
did not create a perfect code of morals, at least it helped to repress
the indecent.
The
home in the twentieth century remained the core of a social
conservatism fundamentally Southern, still harboring “the tenacious clan
loyalty that was so mighty a cohesive force in colonial society.” A
living symbol of the prevailing domestic stability was the front porch
where, in the leisure of the rocking chair, the Southerner endlessly
contemplated the past. Here nothing important had happened since the
Civil War, except that the screen of trees and banisters had grown more
protective.
The
most obvious indication of the tenacity of home life was the survival
of the Southern style of cooking. Assaults upon it came from the
outside, with scientists claiming that monotony and lack of balance in
the eating habits of millions resulted in such diseases as pellagra.
National
advertising imposed Northern food products upon those Southerners who
would heed. Federal subsidies after 1914 enabled home economics to carry
the new science of nutrition into Southern communities and schools. Yet
no revolution in diet took place. Possibly, the . . . teachers
overstepped . . . when they sought to introduce the culinary customs of
Battle Creek and Boston. Their attempted revolution failed for the same
reason as that of the Yankee schoolma’ams during Reconstruction.”
(The South Old and New, A History 1820-1947, Francis Butler Simkins, Alfred A. Knopf, excerpts pp. 292-295)
