Old South, New South

A long time ago, when I was an undergraduate, I enrolled in an Economic History course because UC Davis oddly required all undergraduate economic majors to take an economic history course.  Now that I am an older economist, I suspect this was an oddity of Davis, driven by the internal political power of the economic historians.  I remember two things from my undergrad course—and lest you think that remembering two things from an undergrad course is very little, that is two more things than I remember from most of my undergraduate courses.  (Teachers of undergrads all too often forget the fact that nobody remembers anything from a class three months after the class ends.)  The two things:

1. The railroads were really important, more important than I ever knew.

2. Air-conditioning was really important; the South would not be nearly as prosperous as it is today without it.

I also remember that in addition to the textbook, we had two supplemental books, one of which was Gavin Wright’s Old South, New South.  (I don’t remember what the other book was.) The only things I remember about that book were:

1. My bewilderment about why I, a child of California, should care at all about the South

2. The book was not terrible to read.

I still have my copy of Old South, New South—it has not been opened since the mid-1980s.

Old South, New South is a nice description of a novel I just finished:

Faulkner, The Hamlet

Well, it looks like a novel, but it is more a series of short stories strung together, but since the short stories interrelate and there is a chronological sequence to the stories, it is technically a novel.  It is a story of a town (well, I suppose it is really a hamlet) lost in the Old South.  It’s a small town in Mississippi (Frenchman’s Bend), filled with old-timers who have not only lived there for their entire lives, but ones who can trace their ancestors in the town back to the Civil War, and in terms of the South, the Civil War is the Defining Event—before that lies pre-history.  A sleepy town, the sort of place nothing happens and nothing will ever happen and you can replace the names as the generations drift by, but it is simply changing the labels on the museum pieces.  Nothing ever changes...until the Snopes come to town.

The Snopes.  They multiply like weeds, and we are told that there are a seemingly inexhaustible supply of Snopes which gradually spread throughout the town.  The weeds analogy is right—imagine the well-tended garden, gradually overrun by some foreign invasive species (“invasive species” is a technical term, by the way—I learned it form my horticulturalist wife (not to be confused with my non-horticulturalist wife? I suppose that would be better phrased as “from my wife, who is a horticulturalist”  lest the Reader be confused)).  At the outset of the novel, there are no Snopes; by the end of the novel, there is no Frenchman’s Bend—just Snopesville.  They don’t rename the town or anything, but nonetheless, the hamlet is gone.

How do the Snopes do this?  Oddly, there is no master plan.  Take Flem Snopes; he is like a force of nature.  He just keeps moving right along, getting more and more wealth and power and influence and...he never really seems to do much of anything.  He just moves in like some amoral (amoral, not immoral) object and by the sheer force of not being concerned with hereditary or customary niceties, he rolls across the landscape.  And other Snopes follow in his path, also amoral forces of nature.  A few can be differentiated: Eck Snopes seems, well, nice; I.O. Snopes is a talkative fool, but possibly a shrewd talkative fool; Mink Snopes is mean; Ike Snopes is an Idiot (Hmmm…what do we call people who are Idiots these days? “Lacking in what unenlightened people call intelligence”?) with an unnatural affinity for a cow (not cows, just one particular cow.  A true love story, that—indeed Ike and his cow is the biggest love story in the whole novel).  There are hints of hordes of other Snopes.

I don't think I am reading anything into the book when I say that it seems pretty obvious what the Snopes represent, but I hesitate because a quick Google search reveals that this does not seem to be the sort of seemingly obvious detail that becomes omnipresent when one does a quick Google search.  The Snopes are modern commerce—this is the story of the force of modern commerce running over the Agrarian South.  Modern commerce will destroy that traditional, culture-heavy society which had lived on that land since prehistory.  The Snopes, in other words, are the real technological change in the South—it wasn't air conditioning at all; it was Flem Snopes.  The Snopes win because of the amoral logic of their actions; at every step, in every way, the Snopes simply move in and by refusing to step aside, they gradually, bit by bit, chew up all the Old Ways and introduce a new logic to the hamlet, bending the town to the Logic of Modern Commerce.

Faulkner wrote The Hamlet right after Absalom, Absalom and The Unvanquished, tales centered around the Civil War and its aftermath.  Faulkner creates the world of the postbellum South…and then destroys it.

This is where being from California gets me in real trouble with Faulkner.  I understand the Snopes far better than I understand the historical denizens of Frenchman’s Bend.  I know I am supposed to recoil from Snopes, and there is something a terribly uncultured and distasteful about the whole brood, but I simply don’t have enough longing to live in the hamlet at the outset of the novel to see the fact that it is overrun by Snopes as some sort of great tragedy.  Indeed, it is hard for me not to admire Flem Snopes a bit.  I think I feel a little bit bad about admiring Flem Snopes.  I’m not supposed to admire him…right?