The Appeal., 1923-06-30

War, but it was by no means Destroy
ed. Good blood remained, despite
that colossal bloodletting, and now,
after many years, it is beginning to
show itself. I sometimes think, in
deed, that the setting up of the Ku
Klux Klan, that supreme fruit of
poor white culture; was an extremely
good job for Southern progress. The
Klan provided a vivid and inescap-
able sign of what was going on
among the emerged Chandala; it
made the dangers ahead too plain to
be degraded; it aroused in every civ
ilized Southerner a new determina-
ton to save the South from utter
chaos and imbecility. That new de-
termination is now visible in many
forms. 1t appears, at one extreme,
in a general aesthetic revival-an
heroic effort to lift the South out of
it's depressing provincialism and
puerility in the fine arts. It appears,
at the other extreme, in a new polit-
ical movements concentrated endea-
vor to blow up and get rid of the
childish formulae that have hag-
ridden all politics down there for
years, and to unhorse the mob-mas-
ters who have kept in power by the
mouthing of them, and to restore the
South once more to active and intel
ligent participation in the affairs Of
the nation.
These things cannot be accom-
plished in a few years; they will
take a great deal of time, and a great
deal of hard and thankless effort.
But it seems to be that the energy
for their accomplishment is begin
ming to develop. There are now min
critics in the South which demand
being heard. For the first time
since the Civil War self-criticism is
now possible; more, it begins to
grow almost fashionable. Up to ten
years or SO ago absolutely no intel
ligent discussion of Southern prob
lems ever came out of the South, save
it came from an occasional extraor-
dinary Negro, such as Brooker T.
Washington. But now, in all of the
Southern states save the most back
ward, a new realism is beginning to
show itself, and even the newspapers
are breaking away from their old
hollow platitudes and CUFF.
The battle, when it is fully joined,
will be one of extraordinary ferocity.
for the white morons, having run the
South so long, are not likely to yield
their power without desperate
struggle. Their long tenure, indeed,
has intrenched them firmly in unex-
pected places. The principal politi
cal leaders of the South train with
them, and, in most cases, are of
them; they are supported almost
unanimously by the Southern clergy;
they control, through these clergy,
most Of the institutions of so-called
education south of Virginia. But de-
spite this control, they are beginning
to lose their hold upon the younger
generation, and in all parts of the
South the colleges are centers of the
current uprising. What is happening
there now happened in the North so
long ago as Emerson's time. The
more alert young men and women,
coming into contact with a more ur-
bane culture in the universities, re-
volt against the stupidity and OBJ
scurantism of their elders. The great
majority, perhaps, conform, but it
does not take majority to make a
rebellion.
The struggle between Baptist theo-
logy and the Darwinian hypothesis,
now going on in all of the Southern
States, is typical of the general cul-
tural turmoil. The effort to enforce
Genesis by statute should not be mis-
taken for a unanimous and hopeless
surrender to ignorance, as it is only
too often by Northerners. 1t is ac-
tually no more than a last, desparing
stand against the rising tide of en-
lightenment. When, in the 7O's of
the last century, the president of
Princeton University, Presbyterian
clergyman, stood before the student
body in chapel, and told his charges
that they must either reject Darwin
or cease to be Christians, nine-tenths
of them arose in silence and marched
6'-t. Since then no more against
Darwinism has been heard at Prince
ton. The same thing will happen in
the South, perhaps, not as promptly
and dramatically, but certainly as in
evitably. The campaign for Genesis
will not, of course, affect the incur
ably idiotic, the true white trash,
But the more violently it is waged
and the more frantically the secular
arm is employed to aid it, the more
surely it will ALLEVIATE and arouse
every intelligent youngster south OF
the Potomac, and the closer will come
the day of reckoning for the rogues
and imbeciles who have so long de.
bauched and degraded the South.