Jesse Jackson, Allen Tate, and Lost Causes
Growing Up in My Father's South, Pt. 1 • The Whole ’Nuther, Vol. 2021, No. 9
A Brief Introduction to This Series . . .
I was named after my father’s co-editor at The Hopkins Review, Robert D. Jacobs. The two young men had been graduate students at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1950s, and it was at the Review that my father stumbled upon his career.
When they were planning the Winter 1952 issue of the journal, he and Jacobs wrote to other scholars (also mostly young) asking for papers on Southern writers, hoping to publish a small group of essays on the topic. The response was overwhelming. So many were interested themselves, and recommended other scholars, that it eventually became a “symposium”—several numbers of the journal devoted to Southern writers—from which thirty essays were collected in a book published in 1953 that got a lot of academic attention. It had the effect of highlighting contemporary Southern writing, notably writers of the 1930s and 1940s, in a way that hadn’t been done before. More than that, it helped identify Southern Literature as a distinct sub-specialty of American Literature, one worthy of further study. Over the following decades, my father, Louis D. Rubin, Jr. undertook that study as a professor of English, writing and editing some fifty books, as well as teaching and encouraging creative writing by novelists, poets, essayists, and memoirists from the South.
As you can imagine, having people around who constantly talked about the idea of the South became part of growing up for me. Visitors, some of them well-known writers, were always stopping by our house in North Carolina to huddle with my father about it, and about book projects relating to it. For my part, I was proud of him, and of all the attention that his work got. But looking back now, from the vantage point of a post-Obama, post-Trump, post-“Black Lives Matter” America, I can’t believe how much I didn’t see.
This last decade has made me look at the South, my own childhood in it, and the work of my father’s life, quite differently. Today’s newsletter will be the first of several connected pieces that I’ll write over the coming months about growing up in my father’s South, and how it looks to me now. In this first installment, I’ll try to suggest the big picture.
Remember that video of Jesse Jackson, wiping tears from his eyes the night of Nov. 4, 2008, as he watched his fellow Chicagoans celebrate the election of Barack Obama to the presidency? I recall thinking, as I watched, “Wow, America sure has come a long way.”
I had voted for Jackson in the 1984 North Carolina Democratic primary, happy to support a passionate advocate for social justice as an alternative to the focus group-tested “Where’s the Beef”/“New Ideas” campaign between Gary Hart and Walter Mondale. “Keep hope alive!” was Jackson’s slogan, though I didn’t really have much hope for his campaign. Clearly he was too divisive to win; past comments about Jews hurt his appeal with some Eastern liberals. Even so, he finished a close third in the state, pretty remarkable considering that a little more than twenty years earlier, in early 1963, he’d been arrested there as a college student in Greensboro for “inciting a riot” by leading a civil rights march.
Then, later in 1963, John F. Kennedy was shot. With America shocked and mourning for both Kennedy and the loss of his optimistic outlook about America and its future, Lyndon Johnson rode those sentiments to a big win in 1964, and immediately pushed through the landmark federal Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964 and 1965. In a way, Obama’s 2008 victory was the culmination of all that, forty-four years later: an eloquent, positive, moderately progressive Black man winning the highest political office in the land. He got about half of White vote outside the South, and inspired Blacks (enfranchised by the 1965 act) to register and turn out in record numbers. In North Carolina, though Obama only got 34% of the White vote, 95% of Black voters and 74% of young voters chose him, margins that helped him narrowly win the state. The “New South” that people had talked about for so long was finally becoming a reality, it seemed. Hope and change were the order of the day.
Boy, that didn’t last long.
A Valley of Humility
We had heard a lot about an emerging New South in North Carolina as I was growing up there in the 1960s and 1970s, and we liked knowing we were part of it. My hometown of Chapel Hill stood as a liberal island in a conservative state, one which prompted “Chub” Seawell, who sometimes substituted for right-wing WRAL-TV editorialist Jesse Helms, to famously quip, “Why build a zoo, when you can just put a fence around Chapel Hill?”
Our South was desegregating, growing, and changing for the better, we felt. High tech companies like IBM were moving in. Our leading universities matched any in the nation. When federal courts ordered a massive busing program in 1972 to integrate students in Mecklenburg County (where schools were mostly White) with those in the City of Charlotte (mostly Black), the order was carried out peacefully. We smugly noted that it was Yankees in Boston, Massachusetts—not North Carolina—who rioted and fought for several years after busing was mandated there in 1974. We weren’t throwbacks like Alabama or Mississippi either, with images from Confederate battle banners still part of their state flags1, and the fresh memory of demagogues like George Wallace blocking the doors to the state university to stop integration. My father liked to repeat an old joke that North Carolina was “a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit” (referring to Virginia and South Carolina, both of which made much of their leading roles in the Civil War). We thought that was pretty funny.
So, who was “we”? you might ask. Ah, now it gets interesting.
There has been a longstanding tension in the South, going back to its settling, between White elites and working-class Whites of small cities and towns (at least when they weren’t banding together to keep Blacks down). Mark Twain famously captured it in Huckleberry Finn, when the aristocratic Colonel Sherburn faces down an Arkansas lynch mob of common folk. This split became more ambiguous after the Civil War when no one had any money in the South, and former landed aristocrats, many now “land-poor,” sought to maintain their status and political power by other means, while also maintaining airs of gentility, culture, and learning that were superior to those of the working class. That tension lies at the heart of some of William Faulkner’s best novels, as the status of the old families crumbles with the coming of the twentieth century, and younger generations try to deal with it.
In fact, that’s a major theme of many of the Southern writers of the 1930s and 1940s that my father spotlighted when he and his young colleagues in the 1950s were first staking out the territory. Not only Faulkner, but Robert Penn Warren (his Willie Stark in All the King’s Men is a man of the people—the poor White people—in conflict with the genteel but corrupt Old Guard) and Eudora Welty (many of her stories feature upper-middle class characters who don’t have much money but who still have servants and take music lessons, and who look to better things), among many others. Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, the subject of my father’s graduate school dissertation, focused on an awkward, sensitive young man who feels out of place in the small city where his mother runs a boarding house, and who gradually shakes off what he sees as its shackles as he discovers he’s a writer, at first among the elites attending college in a thinly disguised Chapel Hill and finally on the national stage, a prospect that lies ahead of him when he is accepted for graduate school at Harvard at the book’s end.
In that 1953 symposium, my father wrote one essay on Wolfe, with whom he had a lot in common, and another on the poet Allen Tate, a member of the South’s cultural aristocracy with whom he shared very little. Tate nevertheless remained a subject of fascination for him, and he returned several times in later years to Tate’s poem, “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” which he first tackled in the 1953 essay. He never quite got it right.
Now, please indulge me for a few paragraphs while I do some literary analysis. (I promise that I’ll get back to Jesse Jackson’s tears at Obama’s inauguration, and the South that I grew up in, but I need to set something up first.)
The Serpent at the Gate
Allen Tate was an important twentieth century poet, but also an edgy, uncomfortable character, ill at ease with himself and his home. He embodied many of the worst connotations of the word elite. He began as a modernist, influenced by T.S. Eliot, who wrote the essential modernist poem, The Waste Land. Tate’s own poems were difficult and learned too. Like many modern poets of his generation, despite being a subtle thinker and a man of his time, he clung to a previous generation’s attitudes—refusing to eat or socialize with black writers and intellectuals in the 1930s, and was frequently dismissive or insensitive where women were concerned. As he grew old in the 1960s and 1970s, those attitudes seemed to moderate, at least publicly, but in Fred Hobson’s fine retrospective assessment of Tate in The Atlantic in 2000, Hobson quotes a letter Tate wrote to a friend late in life saying that he was “not moved by the Negro’s demand for social justice and equality (worthy as those causes may be); I am interested in order and civilization, which in a crisis take precedence over all other aims.”
My father kept coming back to “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” probably Tate’s most famous poem, in which a Tate-like modern Southerner stands outside a crumbling, walled Confederate graveyard in the 1920s, simultaneously yearning to enter it and yet aware that time has moved on, even if modern culture seems to him a meaningless, mass-produced Waste Land like Eliot’s. The bones in the graves now only serve to nourish the trees and shrubs growing inside and outside the cemetery; their dead leaves will collect in it and decay as the years go by, whether or not people visit there ceremonially and pay tribute to the fallen:
. . . we who count our days and bow
Our heads with a commemorial woe
In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,
What shall we say of the bones, unclean,
Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?
Writing about it as a young man, in 1953, my father commented on the poem’s concluding image, a green snake in a mulberry bush at the closed cemetery gate, but he dodged any sort of real interpretation. Revisiting it later, in a 1976 essay, he did a bit better at capturing the poem’s essential conflict, writing that
[t]he society in which [the poem’s speaker] had been born and grown up had been importantly formed by [the] past, but it had been repudiated, and since the repudiation had been in favor of a life without meaning or belief, there could be no place for himself within his own society, either.
But when my father came to the concluding image, once again I think he missed the mark:
he [the speaker] is going back into the city of his time; and what he takes with him, finally, is life: for the serpent, whatever he represents, is indubitably alive and green, which is a very different thing from the splayed leaves piled up in the graveyard.
Well, okay, maybe. But since when do most readers associate a snake with life?
To me, it seems pretty clear that the speaker feels that the lost cause the graveyard evokes in his imagination was superior to the banal world in which he lives now: a kind of Eden, you might say, before the fall. But fall the South did. The serpent in the mulberry bush at the gate, Tate writes, “Riots with his tongue through the hush,” a reminder of both the temptations (the lure of power, the South’s arrogance and greed as it sought to make America safe for slavery, and the moral evil of slavery itself) that led to the fall, as well as the subsequent banishment from that imagined agrarian Eden after the war with the collapse of the plantation economy. Now that gate is shut. There’s no going back for people born in the modern South. The serpent both tempts him to taste the Old South myth, which leads to death, and guards the gate like the angel of Genesis 3:24, reminding us that the living cannot reenter Eden, and must endure the fallen world.
A Liberal Faith
Very well. Now, if your eyes aren’t completely glazed over by literary analysis, think for a minute what you’ve just done, with Allen Tate, my father, and me.
Were you thinking about the lynchings of that era, some of which Tate doubtless knew about? There were more than 300 between 1922 and 1926, when the poem was written, and whatever his faults he was no apologist for them. Or the African American soldiers coming back from World War II to the Jim Crow South when my father was editing his book at Johns Hopkins? Or the beatings at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday in 1965, when I was a kid? Or, more recently, the Black Lives Matter protests and George Floyd’s death in Minnesota?
You were not. You had put all that out of your mind, and were considering images, and metaphors, and myths, and literary history. The whole thing had become abstract.
That’s the problem with the way certain Southerners saw the South in the mid- to late twentieth century. They bought into the liberal idea of progress, and it often allowed them to ignore what was really what. It happened to my father, and it happened to me.
Growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, my friends and I laughed at the old North Carolina. We thought the Shake ’n Bake ad on TV was hilarious, as was the fertilizer ad (“Wake up, wake up, the sun is on the rise! It’s time, it’s time, it’s time to fertilize!”). No one that I knew ate barbecue (or admitted it), the DJ on the radio station we listened to joked about life in downtown Lizard Lick, and UNC-Chapel Hill students heckled NC State students by singing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm, EIEIO.” My friends and I played football, basketball, and baseball with Black kids. I had Black friends at my integrated school. Our town elected a Black mayor in 1968, and our parents voted for him. We felt very progressive.
Racism was even safe enough to joke about. I remember going to the movies multiple times with my friends to watch, and re-watch, Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles in 1974, which skewered small-town bigotry under cover of a satire of the Old West. It was so transgressive! We’d quote lines from the movie, especially those where the N-word was used, thrilled at using language we knew we couldn’t use talking to our Black friends, and feeling naughty at doing so. And we weren’t above making racist jokes ourselves, confident we were being ironic, and didn’t really “mean it.” As the children of White liberals, it was our privilege to do so.
My father was a good man, and in the late 1960s and early 1970s he understood how important it was to integrate the UNC English Department’s faculty. In 1969, two years after he joined the department, he recruited a leading African American scholar from historically Black Southern University, Blyden Jackson, who became the first African American full professor at Chapel Hill, and thus the first African American full professor at a previously segregated university in the Southeast. He and Jackson then worked to bring aboard other top Black scholars in the early 1970s. But he was also a man of his time. At home, he would guffaw at excerpts from “Amos ’n’ Andy” when they were played on local public TV or radio documentaries, then turn away, embarrassed, and walk into his study chuckling. Shortly after my wife and I were married, we brought over a very bouncy new puppy (a black Lab mix) that we’d named after a Winnie the Pooh character, the similarly bouncy Tigger. “Around here we say ‘Tigro,’” my father said, chuckling at himself. Afterwards he always called the dog that, if just the family was around.
My father grew up in a highly segregated city, Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1930s—the city where the Civil War began. His father ran a successful electrical store there for a while. He was a Jew, in a place where Jews were mostly shopkeepers and merchants, but were (fortunately for them) accepted as White, even if they were not quite the thing, or invited to join certain clubs. The realities of racial injustice and class divisions were all around my father, and they certainly affected him and his outlook, but he mostly viewed all of that abstractly, and noted it for future reflection. As he became an adult, he stood apart from it. No shopkeeper he, no faithful temple-goer in the Charleston Jewish community. He left both behind. And, like a lot of educated liberals in the South, he chose not to see certain things. Here’s a passage from his 1953 essay on Tate:
What kind of country was the South upon which Tate and his contemporaries of the early 1920s looked back at as well as observed around them? It was first of all a country with considerable historical consciousness, with rather more feeling for tradition and manners than existed elsewhere in the nation.
Jesse Jackson’s parents grew up in that same South (Jackson’s father was about ten years younger than Tate), in Greenville, SC, but their South was a dangerous place in which to live and raise a family, if the wrong people got crossed. Injustice and indignities were thrown in their faces every day; just registering to vote was risky or impossible, medical care was hard to get, and doors to dignified employment and good educations were constantly slammed in their faces. Historical consciousness? Certainly. A fond feeling for tradition and manners? Not so much. Tradition and manners hid a lot.
Jackson’s generation decided it was done with all that. Not for them! If Kennedy could send people to the moon, they could end Jim Crow. They were among the marchers, the people holding sit-ins and boycotts, the lawyers appealing unjust laws and fighting to pass just ones. And, incredibly, they won. Laws got changed. Voting opened up. Black politicians started getting elected. Government-enforced segregation was outlawed. Overt racial discrimination in public facilities was outlawed. Affirmative action programs were adopted by institutions. The future was wide open.
As we now know, of course, it wasn’t really. That’s the whole issue underlying Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, and the conservative backlash against them. You can change laws, but you can’t legislate attitudes; unfair systems based on racism resist real change, even when they meet the letter of the law. Jackson knew that as well as anybody, and much of his work in Chicago in the 1970s tried to address it.
Yet look again at the picture I posted of him above from 2009: he had been moved to tears on election night, and there he is, on inauguration day—smiling, exultant, happy to be present even though he and Obama never got along well, and were uneasy rivals in Chicago politics. He had been on the Memphis motel balcony after Martin Luther King was shot, when America was left with only the dream, not King himself, and had every reason to be bitter. Yet he’s happily posing for a bunch of excited, mostly White Obama supporters with their digital cameras. He’s enjoying the moment, a part of history in the making and glad to witness it, something that deep down he probably never expected to see. In his head, he knows how broken our system still is, but in his heart it clearly means a lot.
I was on the Mall that day too, as the sun rose that morning. I think you can see the same optimism.
Though Jackson graduated high school the year after I was born, we both grew up in an America that had saved the world from Hitler, and was fighting totalitarianism. However flawed America might be (and Jackson would have felt those flaws far more keenly than I did), the power of America’s stated ideals was such that we believed things would get better. Along with faith in science and social progress, this essential optimism embodied the postwar liberal mindset and was one reason John Kennedy’s death in 1963 hit so hard.2 It is, perhaps, what makes Jackson’s generation different from today’s activists, who have a much more jaded view of ever achieving the “beloved community” that Martin Luther King had imagined, and are far less forgiving of the blind spots of naive old-style liberals like me.
Next, in Part II: “What ‘New South’?”
I didn’t notice it at the time, but North Carolina’s flag actually bore, and still bears, a more than passing likeness to the Confederate “Stars and Bars” flag. It’s rarely commented on.
The usually insightful Jonathan Chait, who’s about a decade younger than me, still can’t understand why Kennedy was so important to people of my generation when his presidential accomplishments were quite modest. But it’s who we thought he was, and how he represented (and still represents) our vision of our place in the American story, that’s more important than any tangible accomplishments. I guess you had to be there.
I enjoyed your article very much. I voted for Jackson, too, in the 1984 primary, though I was in Michigan then, the state where I was born. Those were a few very exciting months. Southern cultural and political history complicates some issues that are national in scope, like race. I was born in Detroit, Michigan, in Wayne County, one of the most segregated counties in the country. As you mention, who is included when we say "we" is revealing. That collective pronoun is aspirational, both by those who intend a large embrace as well as by those who prefer to exclude; two forces that have been a constant in American history, become more self-conscious over our lifetimes. I look forward to the rest of your series.