New Students' Convocation Keynote Address
Delivered by John Shelton Reed, Kenan Professor Emeritus
Good evening, and let me add my welcome to those you've already received. As you all arrive at Carolina, I'm just leaving -- retiring after 31 years. Most of you won't be here that long -- your parents certainly hope not -- but most of you will be here long enough to realize what a special place Carolina is. Now that I'm free to live anywhere I want, I honestly can't think of any place I'd rather be than Chapel Hill. I hope you'll come to feel something of the same fondness for it.
I was asked to talk a bit this evening about Confederates in the Attic, one of the first of many experiences that you all will share as Carolina undergraduates. Let me start by saying that I'm not an impartial judge of this book: Tony Horwitz is a friend of mine.
We first met some years ago at a meeting in Louisville where I was moderating a panel on the meaning of the Confederate flag. It was basically a debate between Professor Clyde Wilson, editor of the Calhoun papers at the University of South Carolina and a founder of the League of the South, and Julian Bond, the well-known civil-rights activist who was then a professor at the University of Virginia (not yet chairman of the NAACP). The discussion was polite, but -- not surprisingly -- there was no meeting of the minds.
After the panel was over, an innocent-looking young guy from the audience approached me and introduced himself as Tony Horwitz -- a name that didn't mean anything to me. As I recall, he asked some rather naive questions, and I pontificated a bit for him.
Only later did I realize that I had been reading his dispatches from the South in the Wall Street Journal for some time. I also realized that he was neither as young nor as naive as he appeared to be.
That innocent and engaging curiosity is a mask that conceals a deft reporter, even a sly one, a man who encourages people to say more than they mean to, maybe more than they should. This is after all a journalist whose beat for many years was the Middle East, a place not known for innocence. (He wrote a book about it called Baghdad Without a Map, undoubtedly the funniest book ever written about Iraq.) After that Tony served as the Wall Street Journal's European correspondent, working out of London, then came back to the States and settled in northern Virginia, reporting on national affairs for the Journal, work that won him a Pulitzer Prize.
After we met in Louisville, Tony and I became that odd modern phenomenon: email buddies, sort of electronic penpals. We turned out to have a lot in common: interests in the South, of course, but also in England and the Middle East, where we'd both lived. Most of our "conversation" was online, but my wife and I had lunch with him in Washington, and he stopped by to visit when he was in North Carolina. Later we got to know his wife, Geraldine Brooks, an Australian who is an accomplished writer herself, author of Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women and of a marvelous memoir called Foreign Correspondence.
I knew that Tony was working on a book about the Civil War and historical memory. Many of his newspaper articles at this time fed into that interest: They usually appeared in the front-page-center slot that the Journal reserves for "quirky" material.
When Tony asked me to read the manuscript of that book I gladly agreed. I corrected a few typos and suggested some structural changes -- none of which he made, as far as I can tell, but he's the bestselling author, not me. I also wrote a promotional blurb for the back cover of the first edition, soon replaced by a quotation from one of the many rave reviews the book received.
Not all the reviews were raves, and I'll get to that in a minute. But for the most part, the book was well-received. After it was published Tony left the Wall Street Journal to write for The New Yorker, mostly on Southern topics ranging from the futile search for Eric Rudolph in western North Carolina to the wretched yuppie excess of the Inn at Little Washington in northern Virginia. He's spending this year with Geraldine and their child in Australia -- about as far from the South as possible -- where he's working on a book about Captain Cook. Through the miracle of modern telecommunications you'll meet him later this fall.
Even if I didn't know and like the author of this book, however, I believe I would find it valuable -- more for the questions it raises than for the answers it gives -- and of course the book's a lot of fun, too. It sometimes made me laugh out loud.
Not everyone agrees. Some defenders of the Confederate faith have assailed Tony for his treatment of the last Confederate widow, among other evidences of what they see as disrespect. On the other hand, a few academic historians have criticized him, too, charging him with guilt by association, for being too respectful of some folks they find disgusting. That Tony could hang out with these yahoos, even "spoon" with them, and not condemn them strikes these folks as irresponsible, not to say politically incorrect.
Back when Tony was being fired on from all sides I reminded him of Nathan Bedford Forrest's response to the news that the Yankees were both behind his position and in front of it. General Forrest's command was: "Attack in both directions."
I think most of Tony's critics suffer from ideological tunnel vision and are seriously humor-impaired. But there are a few folks whose dislike for the book I take more seriously. These are men and women who feel that Tony's book presents the South as a sort of American freak show, and resent that.
One of my good friends here, a man I admire very much, declined the invitation to conduct a discussion group on these grounds. I told him that, if he thinks Tony was hard on us, he should see what he wrote about Iraq.
Certainly this book introduces us to some odd people, many of them on the fringes of Southern life, a few of them on the fringes of sanity. But Tony doesn't present them as in any sense representative Southerners -- in fact, he explicitly denies that they are. He recognizes that to many Southerners these days -- perhaps to many of you -- the Civil War is as remote as the War of the Roses. I'm sure many Southern teenagers think General Sherman had something to do with tank warfare, if they think of General Sherman at all.
A hundred years ago, things were different. In 1900 a Southerner was someone who stood up for "Dixie", saluted the Stars and Bars, and honored the memory of the Lost Cause and its heroes. Of course, this definition excluded a good many white residents of the South and nearly all black ones, but their views on the matter carried no weight.
As Tony's book amply demonstrates, this version of Southernness is still with us. But although some of you may share it, my guess is that most of you see the folks Tony hung out with as something like living fossils. So do I. But in education fossils do have their uses.
One purpose of a liberal education has always been to liberate students from their own cultural parochialism. You study the Greeks and Romans, or the Trobriand Islanders, or the Aztecs, to learn what's human and universal, but also to enter imaginatively into cultures in which practices like slavery, infanticide, or human sacrifice were normal, everyday practices, accepted by good and decent people.
The point is not to bask in our superiority to ancient or primitive cultures. Far from it. Ideally this process raises the question of which of our taken-for-granted institutions will someday be seen as self-evident abominations.
Whatever your individual background, whatever your "heritage" -- Confederate-American, African-American, Yankee-American, or something else altogether -- you will have the opportunity to explore it here. But one of the best ways to deepen your understanding of your own culture is to understand as best you can some other, very different world-view -- not to accept it, but to understand how someone could. One way to read Tony's book is that you don't have to go back in time or to another continent to find striking contrasts to the dominant, modern, American view of things.
A more obvious, less rarified way to read the book, though, is for the questions that it raises about the South -- questions that are central to our common life in this region in this new century. What does it mean to be "Southern" -- if, indeed, it means anything these days? Is there one "Southern heritage" or many? Who gets to decide what that phrase means?
Beneath the book's account of its author's misadventures and encounters with colorful characters lie serious considerations of historical memory and myth -- "myth" not in the sense of falsehood, necessarily, but meaning simply the story people tell about their past. Groups will have stories about themselves and their history. Indeed, many groups are created, defined, by such stories -- more or less accurate, more or less flattering, more or less useful. People die for myths, and for the symbols that evoke them. For things like flags. Some versions of history should bear a warning label: "Danger: Harmful or fatal if swallowed."
How are we going to deal with a past that, like most peoples', is a mixture of triumph and tragedy, grandeur and squalor, oppression and accomplishment? Twenty-five years ago, Tanya Tucker sang a country song called "I Believe the South is Going to Rise Again," in which she called on Southerners to "forget the bad and keep the good." Can we do that? Can we accept a sort of no-fault history and move on? Sounds nice, but one lesson of Tony's book is that we're going to have some trouble sorting out the good and the bad to everyone's satisfaction.
I hope you're beginning to understand why I think Confederates in the Attic is a good choice to start off your careers here at Carolina. If you haven't already found it thought-provoking you must be brain-dead, and I'm sure it will furnish the material for some good discussions this fall.
There's one more reason I think it's a good choice. It's especially appropriate that freshmen at the University of North Carolina should be reading a book about the American South. And this is my last point.
Ask yourselves: What's special about Carolina? What makes it different from any of a hundred other universities we could name? One important difference is that, for over seventy years, Carolina has been a great Southern university, training many of our region's leaders, studying and serving the South to an extent no other institution can rival. As early as the 1930s Chapel Hill had built a record of regional scholarship and service that led historian John Egerton to characterize UNC as (in his words) "the light of the South and a place of national significance."
This tradition is still alive. It's simply a fact that you can't seriously study the history or culture of the South without, sooner or later, coming to Chapel Hill to do it. Studying the South is one thing -- maybe the one thing -- that we do better than anyone else in the world.
Dozens of faculty members across the university take the South as their subject. The Southern Oral History Program captures the opinions and recollections of both famous and "ordinary" Southerners. Our magnificent library is systematically documenting the South from its pre-history to the present, and making that documentation available on the Internet. Two fine quarterlies, the Southern Literary Journal and Southern Cultures, are edited here. The Odum Institute for Research in Social Science is the principal agency and repository for studies of Southern public opinion. The Southern Historical Collection and the Southern Folklife Collection are research archives simply not equaled anywhere else.
When UNC recently established a new Center for the Study of the American South we were building on the fact that Carolina has been and still is not just a great Southern university, but arguably the great Southern university.
Which is why a book like Confederates in the Attic -- a book that raises, however humorously and obliquely, serious questions about Southern heritage, Southern history, and Southern identity -- is a fitting beginning to your education in this place.
Let me close in the approved Southern fashion, with a story -- one of my favorites.
In 1938 Jonathan Daniels of the Raleigh News and Observer was in Marked Tree, Arkansas, talking with a country lawyer. When Daniels said he was from North Carolina, the lawyer pointed to a shelf of books on the South, many of them from the UNC Press, written by UNC authors like Howard Odum, Rupert Vance, and Arthur Raper.
"Do you know Odum?" he asked.
Daniels said he did.
"And Vance?" the lawyer asked.
Daniels said "yes."
"Have you read Raper's [book] Preface to Peasantry?"
Daniels nodded.
"I've got 'em all," the lawyer said. "That's a great university at Chapel Hill."
It is a great university -- and a great Southern university. You should know that, take pride in it, and, in the immortal words of the Beach Boys, be true to your school.
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Last revised: August 21, 2000