The Appeal., 1923-06-30

Morons And Bullies Responsible
For Dixie Disorders, Says Mencken
Kux Kan Chief Product of Poor White Culture Which Rules
South, Writer Asserts Ignorance Making Last
Stand Against Progressiveness

In the labor troubles which now
affiict the South, paralyzing produc-
ton on the farms and even hamper
ing industry in the towns, there ap-
pears to be, at least on the surface,
a grim, sardonic retribution. For a
generation past the red-blooded
Anglo-Saxon he-men of the region
have been devoting themselves hero
ically to torturing and numbering
their black fellow-citizens-pursu-
ing them with dogs, gelding them
without anesthetics, stringing them
upon trees and telegraph poles, and
roasting them alive over slow fires:
Now at last the distracted Moors
having got and saved some share Of
the loot of the war, lay it out upon
tickets to the North, where the worst
they have to fear is an occasional
beating by the police. Every train
crossing the Ohio and Potomac river
bridges is black with them. They
swarm like ants in the slums of the
Northern cities and thousands are alb
sorbed by the mines and steel mills
of the Back country. Entrepre-
neurs, urban and rural, are quite
unable to find other slaves to take
their places. High wages alone, it
appears, cannot attract labor, nor
even free rations of yam and water
melons. What the modern serf de-
mands, first of all, is security in his
person and domicile, and this is pre-
cisely what the South cannot offer.
Against every possibility of Turing
foreign labor into the region there
stands the massive fact of the Ku
Klux Klan. The laborious wops have
heard of it, the bohunks have heard
of it. and so have all the other brach-
ycephalous victims of the Nordic
blond renaissance. These new-com-
ers to the Republic, as every student
of 100 per cent literature is well
aware, are but little removed in in
tellect from the hairy primates;
nevertheless they are still sagacious
enough to keep out of the South. So
the cotton fields become weed-grown,
the wild beasts Of the hill come down
10 ueVOuI Clc COIu, eIlO lAAot 'SoSSS
began to plaster the old plantation.
It is a spectacle, as l hint, that is
not devoid of a certain low, bitter
humor. To behold the Rabbits of
such states as Mississippi in public
meeting assembled, trying to WOO
back the departing Ethiops with po-
lite and even pleading words-surely
this is enough to wiring snicker
from melancholic. But the fun
I believe, is all on the surface. Un-
derneath there is very serious sit
uation, and it deserves to be treated
with decent gravity. The problem
before the South is not the simple
one of holding its field-hands to their
jobs. It is the far more complex and
vexatious one of delivering the whole
area from the domination of the ig-
norant and degraded white men who
have run it and roweled it since the
Civil War. Once these cads are up
set the labor problem will solve it.
self, in so far as it can be solved
in Christendom, and even the larger
race problem will be on the way to
solution. But as long as their sim
ian ideas prevail, as they do today,
nothing genuinely describable as
civilization can maintain itself south
of Virginia.
There are, in fact, two Souths, and
the future of the whole region de-
pends upon which one prevails. There
is, first, the South Of the old gentry;
urbane, educated, civilized, tolerant.
There is, second, the South of the
former poor, white trash; uncouth
ignorant, barbarous, bullying. It is
this second South that has been on
top since reconstruction days, and
Of it's ascendancy has flowed nine
tenths of the difficulties, political and
social, that have beset the Southern
people. It has steadily brought down
Southern politics to the level of
spoils and demagoguery; it has made
pathetic buffoonery of Southern
education; it has fostered and infam-
ed race differences; it has corrupted
and degraded Southern journalism;
it has reduced Southern Christianity
to a burlesque and an obscenity. This
is the South of the Ku Klux Klan, OF
the Billy Sunday revival, Of complete
aesthetic and ideational sterility, of
burnings and lynchings of Blease. and
Vardaman, of Prohibition and Jew
batting, of anti-Darwinism and free
silver. This is the South, alas, that
Northerners usually think of when
they think of the South at all.
But there is the other South also
the South of an older tradition, and
today, despite it's long submergence
If shows innumerable signs of reviv-