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“Knowing Movement, Wanting Order”: Michael O'Brien on the US South
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 May 2016
Extract
It is easy to forget that interest in the intellectual history of the US South only fully emerged in the post-1960s years. Though there have been no outstanding southern philosophers or philosophers of the South to focus on, there have been plenty of talented literary and cultural critics and political and social thinkers, as well as historians, political scientists, and sociologists, whose work has significantly shaped the idea of the South and who thus deserve the interest of the intellectual historian. Works as varied as Clement Eaton's The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (1940) Rollin Osterweis's Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (1949), and William R. Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee (1961) were early examples of the effort to identify the intellectual and cultural issues central to the history of the region. By exploring the literary history of the South in the interwar years, what came to be called the Southern Renaissance, post-1945 literary historians such as Louis D. Rubin and Lewis Simpson undoubtedly also influenced those who tried to make sense of the life of the mind below the Mason–Dixon line.
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References
1 W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (London: Penguin, 1971). The all-encompassing German term here is Geist and it is sometimes translated as “mind,” even though “spirit” is more common.
2 Cash, The Mind of the South, 117–18. O'Brien published an early piece on Cash, “W. J. Cash, Hegel and the South, Journal of Southern History, 44 (Aug. 1978), 379–98), but, as he says, he modified it considerably when it was published as “A Private Passion: W. J. Cash,” in Michael O'Brien, Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 179–89.
3 Michael O'Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
4 Thanks to David Moltke Hansen, John Thompson, and, especially, Patricia O'Brien for the biographical information about Michael 's education and early professional career. For his comments on the state of southern history see “A Retrospective on the Southern Intellectual History Circle, 1988–2013,” S-USIH blog, at http://s-usih.org/2014/01/a-retrospective-on-the-southern-intellectual-circle-1988-2013.html. The three historians he was referring to are Tony Badger (twentieth-century southern political history), Betty Wood (history of slavery) and himself.
5 O'Brien later paid handsome tribute to Woodward with an edition of The Letters of C. Vann Woodward (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), introduced with a 45-page overview of Woodward's career.
6 John Thompson, email to Richard H. King, in reference to “Reading and Remembering Michael O'Brien,” memorial service, 19 Nov. 2015. Willie Morris's autobiography, North toward Home (1967), charts Morris's move from Mississippi and Texas to New York and then editorship of Harper's magazine in the early 1960s. Numerous southern writers and intellectuals, including Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, and Carson McCullers all followed this same trajectory in their lives, though Welty, O'Connor, and Lee eventually returned to the South to live and write.
7 Michael O'Brien, “The Endeavor of Southern Intellectual History” (1988), in O'Brien, Rethinking the South, 1–15, 2, 5. See also O'Brien, “A Retrospective on the Southern Intellectual History Circle,” for the comment about “fascination” not “identity.”
8 Besides O'Brien's The Idea of the American South, 1920–1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), see Francis Garvin Davenport, The Myth of Southern History: Historical Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature (1970); Morton Sosna, In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals and the Race Issue (1977); Richard H. King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Re-awakening of the American South (1980); Daniel J. Singal, The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919–1945 (1982); Fred Hobson, Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1983). See also Michael Kreyling's Inventing Southern Literature (1998) for an analysis of the origins of canonical “southern literature” and the so-called Southern Renaissance.
9 As the Canadian Shreve McCannon famously asks Quentin Compson at the end of Absalom, Absalom! (1936), “Why do you hate the South?” To which Quentin replies, “I don't hate it.”
10 Like others who embraced the “mind” metaphor, O'Brien treated the regional culture as a kind of collective psyche. This tradition derived both from the Romantic–Herderian emphasis on cultures as coherent wholes and from the psychoanalytic–anthropological tradition of national character studies produced by “culture and personality” studies.
11 The irony here is that O'Brien spent a lot of time identifying the abstractions by which southerners thought of themselves, even as many southern conservatives denied the importance of abstractions. Michael O'Brien, “Intellectual History and the Search for Southern Identity,” in O'Brien, Rethinking the South, 207–18, 207–8.
12 Michael O'Brien, “The Lineaments of Antebellum Southern Romanticism” (1986), in O'Brien, Rethinking the South, 38–56, 50.
13 O'Brien, Conjectures of Order, Volume I, 221.
14 Michael O'Brien, “On the Mind of the Old South and Its Accessibility” (1982), in O'Brien, Rethinking the South, 19–37, 19.
15 O'Brien, “Intellectual History and the Search for Southern Identity,” 210, 218.
16 O'Brien, Conjectures of Order, Volume I, 285–86.
17 O'Brien, “Intellectual History and the Search for Southern Identity,” 207.
18 O'Brien, “On the Mind of the Old South and Its Accessibility,” 20.
19 O'Brien offers very little that is new on Fitzhugh and Calhoun as conservatives, except to reject the idea that they were arch-reactionaries or threats to the national union. His claims for the modernity of the South are largely convincing, if a bit undertheorized or -explored. It is not clear what modernity actually entailed for O'Brien.
20 O'Brien, Conjectures of Order, Volume I, 17.
21 O'Brien, Rethinking the South, 230 n. 37.
22 Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters (New York: Library of America, 1990; first published 1886), 735. I heard Genovese deliver something like this judgement at the Porter Fortune Symposium at the University of Mississippi on “The American South in Comparative Perspective” in the fall of 1989.
23 O'Brien, Conjectures of Order, Volume II, 1202.