The New Beginning: Virginia is for Lovers

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Virginia is for Lovers

according to the tourism industry. The Commonwealth of Virginia.

(This post written in response to Mr. Snyder's The South Will Rise Again.)

I have a positive image of Virginia, for the most part, having spent 2 years at Christendom College. Then there was the first Virginian I met, Fr. N of the FSSP. He is from Richmond, and we had met at the seminary--he actually helped train me to be an altar server, and I was his assistant, scheduling servers for the various Masses. He certainly displayed what I came to think of as Southern politesse.

Then there were the Cuddebacks and the Blums at Christendom--the Blums are Virginia natives, as are the Cuddebacks, as far as I know--hospitable and devoted to their native state. Since Christendom is located in Virginia, there were plenty of Catholics attending the school who were from the South. I found them to be generally friendly and polite, more so than people from the West or from New England. There was one warm person from New Jersey; I'm not sure where the Brown siblings were from, but KB was nice. Those who seemed to be the most cold were from the northern Midwest, like Wisconsin and Minnesota. (With Lori O. being an exception?). I can't say much about the Midwest, though the people I know from Ohio are friendly, though perhaps they have a different set of manners than people from the South.

As for the inhabitants of Front Royal, I never had any problems with them--everyone I encountered was polite and friendly. I can't say that I ever encountered racism while I was in Virginia, though it was clear that some had never seen an Asian before (or perhaps one or two). But I didn't sense a hostile or prejudiced attitude. Front Royal is one hour west of Washington, D.C. (website for the Federals); but I think it is somewhat isolated from Yankee influence. There are some differences between Northern Virginia and Southern Pennsylvania, though I've never been in a rural community in Southern Pennsylvania. What is Lancaster like? I'd like to visit the Amish in Pennsylvania...

[Amishnews, Amish.net, Amish Experience, Amish Peddler, Lancaster County Visitors Center]

One of the most famous Virginians has to be Thomas Jefferson, who established the Univeristy of Virginia (where the Blums did their undergraduate studies). Another would be the first president under the Constitution [Cornell], George Washington. I haven't had the opportunity to visit Mount Vernon or Monticello; for me those aren't places I would want to visit alone. A third famous Virginian would be Robert E. Lee; he will make an appearance at the end of the post.

Morever, I have not visited Colonial Williamsburg, the colony of Roanoke, or Jamestown (which Queen Elizabeth 2 will be visiting this year for the 400th anniversary of its establishment). I didn't have a car at Christendom (I still don't), so it was difficult for me to get around. The college should organize some outings to these historical places for its students. I also wish the college dances would be more traditional, featuring American folk dances like the Virginia Reel... I would like to exerience more of traditional Virginian culture...

The Country Dance and Song Society

More on Jamestown:
Virtual Jamestown
APVA

Colin Farrell as Captain John Smith and Q'Orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas in the film The New World.

some production stills; production photos; more about the film

I shouldn't forget Shenandoah National Park and Skyline Drive; would it be wrong to say that these are some of Sarge's favorite places? I canoed on the Shenandoah River only once, Fr. Riley took us out that time; it'd be nice to do again. (The tourism site for Shenandoah.)

Then there is the legacy of Thomas Jefferson.

Portrait by Charles W. Peale.

Portait by Rembrandt Peale

Thomas Jefferson Digital Archive
Thomas Jefferson on Politics and Government
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson
Project Gutenberg
The Works of Thomas Jefferson
The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson
Cambridge University Press volume
Jefferson Memorial
Establishing a Federal Republic
The Thomas Jefferson Papers
The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society
wiki

I won't go into the conflict between the Democractic Republicans and the Federalists, except to say that their political battles foreshadowed what was to come half a century later. Jefferson's political writings I would like to study in greater depth later, so I won't attempt to offer anything "new" or "original" here. The link between the writings of the American political thinkers like Jefferson and medieval political theories is something I wish to investigate, especially on the question of sovereignty, but first I need to understand the medievals well...

Wendell Berry (who is from Kentucky) sees himself as a Jeffersonian. (Mark Engler's article on Mr. Berry.) While I'm on the topic of agrarianism, let me mention the Southern Agrarians or the Vanderbilt Agrarians (not exactly Virgnia, but still germane to this point of the post).
Their important essays can be found in I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. This inspired a "sequel" (not wholly attributable to the original 12), Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence.

Agrarian Valhalla: The Vanderbilt and Beyond, by Joe Scotchie (see also his essay on Richard Weaver)

(source)
One of the 12 original founders, Allen Tate. Introduced to me by Dr. Blum. [TN Encyclopedia; uiuc.edu; some poems; "The Violence of Allen Tate" by David Yezzi]

According to wiki, Allan C. Carlson, along with Wendell Berry, is considered to be a successor to the Southern Agrarians.

Then there is the Southern Partisan Magazine, which like anything that seems to support the Confederacy, is deemed to be problematic, if not racist. It no longer has a website as far as I can tell, so I can't judge any such claims for myself. Still, there is this SP interview of Thomas DiLorenzo. I note that its first editor was Dr. Thomas Fleming; it is now under Christopher M. Sullivan, who was elected to be the head of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (Mr. Sullivan's CIC page). At the end of the Dr. DiLorenzo interview there is this information:

This interview is Copyright 2004 by Southern Partisan.
To subscribe to this bimonthly magazine, send $40 to Southern Partisan, P.O. Box
11708, Columbia, South Carolina 29211.

I don't know if it is still current. A collection of essays from the magazine had been published but is no longer in print, So Good a Cause. An article at Salon that recounts the controversy involving John Ashcroft and the magazine. All I see from critics are charges of racism and the support of slavery without any concrete evidence other than that those they attack are supporters of an independent South.

More on the League of the South:
From an obituary last year for Grady McWhiney at Chronicles:

The League of the South is, of course, not a hate group—hate group being the latest term for “Southern group.” The League of the South could more accurately be described as a love group. If a hate group is hateful, then the odious Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate group. And the odious obituary for Grady McWhiney powerfully suggests that the New York Times is a hate group.

Grady McWhiney Research Foundation
Confederate Crackers and Cavaliers

From the Dallas Morning News obituary for Dr. McWhiney:

Henry Grady McWhiney challenged historical tradition by proposing that the nation's bloodiest internal conflict may have been less a war of ideology and more a clash of cultures.

The scholar, historian and author died April 18 at his home in Abilene. He was 77.

Dr. McWhiney was born July 15, 1928, in Shreveport, La. After he completed school, he enlisted in the Marine Corps during the final year of World War II. He married Sue Baca in California in 1947.

After his military service, Dr. McWhiney returned to Louisiana and attended Centenary College. After graduation, he earned a master's degree at Louisiana State University. He earned a doctorate in 1960 from Columbia University in New York.

Dr. McWhiney had a 44-year academic career, holding posts at Troy State University, the University of California at Berkeley, Northwestern University, the University of British Columbia, Wayne State University, the University of Alabama and Texas Christian University.

Dr. McWhiney focused most of his career on mid-19th-century American history, and his knowledge of the Civil War was in high demand at Civil War Round Table groups throughout the country.

He was a prolific publisher and wrote or contributed to dozens of books.

One of Dr. McWhiney's more provocative publications was 1988's Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South. Mr. McWhiney theorized that fundamentally different cultures evolved in the South and the North from immigrant bases with a history of conflict. He said that those differences exploded into a war that was "not as much brother against brother as culture against culture."

"He made the argument that cultural continuity helped make Southerners distinctive. It was pretty aggressive in that somehow Southerners were different from other Americans," said Donald Frazier, a professor of history at McMurry University in Abilene who earned a doctorate under Dr. McWhiney's auspices.

Dr. Frazier said Dr. McWhiney's work was groundbreaking because it examined events not in terms of race or black-and-white issues but in the perspective of cultural heritage. He said that reviews for Cracker Culture were mixed.

"He was provocative academically in that he looked at things in new ways," Dr. Frazier said. "Any time you are out there with a new idea, you are bound to draw some fire."

In the book Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage, Dr. McWhiney proposed that during the war Southerners tended to attack too often and that propensity was due to their Celtic heritage, Dr. Frazier said.

After his retirement in 1995, Dr. McWhiney suffered a series of strokes. Fearing he was near death with no heirs, he enlisted the aid of Dr. Frazier to found the Grady McWhiney Research Foundation in Abilene, using his estate as its endowment. The foundation's mission is to further education on American history in the middle years of the 19th century, Civil War history, Texas history and global military history.

One of the foundation's accomplishments was the purchase of the Buffalo Gap Historic Village in Taylor County, a collection of Texas frontier buildings and artifacts.

Dr. McWhiney "argued that history is something that should be accessible to everyone," Dr. Frazier said.

The War of Northern Aggression, or the War to Prevent Southern Independence... (Brian Dunaway's War and Secession)

Sam Francis argues against the contemporary movement towards secession. His review of Gods and Generals.

Stephen Lang as Gen. Jackson, Robert Duvall as Gen. Lee in Gods and Generals. (I still have to watch the movie all the way through.)

[Ron Maxwell's website, Jeff Shaara, an interview with Mr. Shaara. Surprisingly, the Apple trailers are still on-line.]

The prominent Confederate general of the movie...
General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson
VMI page; his papers (I don't want to get into a discussion about VMI and its going co-ed.)
Stonewall Jackson Homepage
American Civil War
wiki
The Letters of Stonewall Jackson to His Wife