After meaning to do so for years, I’ve finally gotten around to reading H.L. Mencken’s “The Sahara of the Bozart,” his hair-curling (and all too accurate) indictment of southern culture. It was published in 1917, while Reconstruction was still underway. This paragraph, in particular, stood out:
Politics in Virginia are cheap, ignorant, parochial, idiotic; there is scarcely a man in office above the rank of a professional job-seeker; the political doctrine that prevails is made up of hand-me-downs from the bumpkinry of the Middle West-Bryanism, Prohibition, all that sort of filthy claptrap; the administration of the law is turned over to professors of Puritanism and espionage; a Washington or a Jefferson, dumped there by some act of God, would be denounced as a scoundrel and jailed overnight.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine how well this describes Virginia politics today.
Spot.fucking.on.
(please don’t ask me where this is NOT the case)
… or U.S. politics!!!
http://www.richmondsunlight.com/committee/house/rules/
I’m getting an error on this page, can you take a look?
Sounds about right. Waldo, is this the same piece where Mencken referred to Richmond as “Byzantium on the James”? I’ve been chuckling mordantly about that one for years.
First, a little history lesson.Reconstruction had long ended by 1917.
Its end is usually seen in occurring in 1877 when some disputed electoral votes in the South(sound familiar) in the 1876 presidential election were given to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes with the understanding that federal troops would be withdrawn from the south.
Shortly thereafter white supremacist governments replaced the Reconstruction governments in all the ex-Confederate states and a period of racism and oppression of African-Americans began that lasted until the middle of the 20th century and the beginnings of the civil rights movement.
Jim Crow laws of all sorts, “separate but equal”, lynchings, and almost total disfranchisement of black voters occurred then.
Its ironic that Mencken wrote this before the great flowering of Soutthern culture that emerged in the 1930s, with writers like William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren and so on.
An excellent study of this is Richard H. King’s “A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the America South 1930-1955”. King studied history as a graduate student at Uva under Paul Gaston in the 1960s. Its a bit scdemicallly abstruse at times but a valuable work. It also argues at one point that Mencken was not as anti-Southern as at first appears.
As for Virginia politics,V.O. Key in his classic “Southern Politics” published in 1946 argued that it was the most conservative state in the union.
Its good to look back and see how far we have come. I think it started with the election of Republican governor Linwood Holton(our present gov’s father-in-law) in 1969. People now may not be aware of this, but in the days when the autocratic,segregationist Byrd Democratic machine ruled the state, if you wanted to vote for someone with more liberal or progressive views, you voted Republican in Virginia state elections.(Although the party was a weak opposition on into the early 1960s).
Today the Republicans offer us Bob Marshall and Jim Gilmore. The Democrats have given us Mark Warner, Tim Kaine,and Jim Webb. How times (and parties) have changed!
You’re quite right — active, physical reconstruction lasted until 1877. But the very fact that Mencken was moved to write that essay is evidence that reconstruction was very much still under way come 1917. The difference is how far out one wants to extend capital-R Reconstruction, as opposed to lower-case-R reconstruction.
It could be argued that lower case R reconstruction is still going on in the southern states. Religous fundamentalism still plays a major part, and influences the political culture-issues like teaching creationism in schools, banning abortion and gay marriage seem more prevalent here. Along with the Republican Party pandering to such elements-reading how Huckabee and Thompson are both pinning their hopes on conserrvative Christians in the South Carolina primary. And for that matter, Rudy Giuliani being endorsed by Pat Robertson. And note the Democratic ticket carried no ex-Confederate states in 2004.