Reading Zachary J. Lechner’s “The South of the Mind”

Published in 2018, Zachary J. Lechner’s The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southernness, 1960–1980 carries the reader through a series of well-argued and well-organized propositions about the beliefs, myths, and narratives that have been created, endorsed, and embraced to make sense of white Southern men during and right after the Civil Rights movement. Though the book’s purview begins a decade earlier than the purview of Nobody’s Home, the material in the earlier portions of Lechner’s book feeds directly into this project’s focus and cannot be ignored as the catalyst for the era that began in or around 1970. The two particularly nice things about reading The South of the Mind, as a GenXer who grew up in the South and as the editor of a project that focuses on the South, are: first, the behavior of white Southern men is examined in other contexts than racist violence alone, and second, that Lechner discusses countercultural versions of white masculinity that involve racial and political progressivism.

Just as Matthew Lassiter’s The Silent South was familiar to me in the areas of suburbs and schools, this book’s subject was familiar to me because these were the types of men who I knew growing up in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. And this book is very much focused on men, from George Wallace or Andy Griffith to the Allman Brothers Band and Jimmy Carter. There were a few archetypes in those days, among them the old-school holdout who lamented the end of the previous era, the new suburbanite who valued material goods and social status, the Southern-badass-hippie who blended outlaw independence with a progressive “live and let live” ethos. There were old dudes with their Bryl-creem hairdos and dark-blue Levi’s and young dudes with long locks and faded Levi’s, none of them willing to accept being overruled or overtaken. It was a man’s, man’s, man’s, man’s world.

Lechner begins his “Introduction: Raising the White South” with an admittedly unlikely subject. Richard N. Goodwin was a “Jewish Bostonian” who been an advisor to two presidents, Kennedy and Johnson. However, Goodwin wrote what Lechner says was one of the seminal “imaginings” of the post-Civil Rights South, a place with a “positive postsegregation future” that would include an “economic boom.” Here, we see a version of the South which constitutes the “antithesis of modern American society.” But this time, being the opposite of the mainstream wasn’t a bad thing — like slaveholding and the Civil War were bad things, like lynching was a bad thing. Instead, what Goodwin saw and what Lechner will discuss is the idea that America had become a soulless place where people’s personalities and dreams came from an unthinking devotion to patriotism and commercialism. The South was different. It was a place where authenticity was still a mainstay, where a lag in technology distanced people from the forces of media imagery and corporate sales pitches. It was a place where “traditional values” still reigned and where individualism was still important. One downside was the South’s accompanying propensity for violence to enforce its values and its sometimes-extreme independence, while other drawbacks involved “intolerance, aversion and suspicion to new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an exaggerated individualism and a too narrow concept of social responsibility,” and more. Popular movies helped these new myths and narratives along, and Sunbelt South boosterism played its part, too.

So the Old South had fallen (again), and that made room for reinvented New Souths to appear (again). The first chapter, “The Many Faces of the South,” introduces us to three of those: the Vicious South, the Changing South, and the Down-Home South. The first of those was not born during the 1960s but it did rear its ugly head then. In the early to mid-twentieth century, Southerners showed themselves capable of terrible atrocities and of an unthinkable toleration for those atrocities. Lechner’s examination begins in 1960 and focuses quickly on two then-recent books: John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me and John Steinbeck Travels with Charley. Both provided American readers with unflattering portrayals of the South and its people. Next, we have the Changing South, which offered a narrative of progress out of dark days and into something better. For this, Lechner offers us To Kill a Mockingbird and In the Heat of the Night, each of which show glimmers of hopes that the bastions of racist patriarchy can be overcome when humanity is introduced or allowed. Finally, there is the Down-Home South, a good-time narrative embraced by the relatively new medium of television. In shows like Andy Griffith and The Beverly Hillbillies, American audiences saw rural Southerners not as “vicious” antagonists bent on violence, nor as a growing and evolving people, but as simple and basically virtuous folks who did their best with what they had: their families and their values. The first of these three paradigms focused on the evils of racism, the second on the possibility of what could be forthcoming, while the last of the three was virtually devoid of bad vibes at all.

Chapter two, “This World from the Standpoint of a Rocking Chair,” moves the reader into the musical subgenre Southern rock. It was finding this chapter that prompted me to buy and read Lechner’s book. I grew up on this music, and it remains as some of my favorite music to this day, which makes its history particularly appealing. The chapter does a good job of articulating the complicated and nuanced ways that the hippies’ interest in bucolic communes and the countercultural fascination with new musical styles came together and somehow allowed the left-wing disdain for the Vicious South to be set aside and almost ignored in favor of embracing the Down-Home South instead. He writes, “Envisioning the white South, then, was another variation of ‘dropping out’ for interested hippies.” Lechner’s explanation includes the necessary characters like Gram Parsons and the Sweetheart of the Rodeo album, but also lesser-known aspects like the Atlanta-based Great Speckled Bird newspaper. Here, we see the contradictions in this strange amalgam of cultural features, from a countercultural understanding of the South’s violent resistance to nonconformity in the final scene in Easy Rider to the “feeling of easygoing timelessness” that many back-to-the-land types found in isolated Southern communities. Of course, you can’t leave out the “cosmic cowboy” of the Armadillo World Headquarters in Texas, nor the contributions of The Band’s Robbie Robertson, that Canadian songwriter whose “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” came to life through Arkansan Levon Helm’s wonderful voice.

I want to pause here and step away from Lechner’s book to speak for myself again. I was a child in the South during the time and in the place when these countercultural stews were being mixed up and boiled down. I was young and impressionable when Smokey and the Bandit and The Dukes of Hazzard were in their heyday, when Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and Kenny Rogers’ “Coward of the County” were on the radio, and when smoky sunglasses, shaggy hair, a heavy moustache, and a bent-up cowboy hat told the world, This is not a man to be messed with. Though knowing about The Band or reading Great Speckled Bird, which stopped publication in 1976, were beyond our childish reach, the paradigms of a new kind of Southern man were there. We saw our dads with their five-dollar short haircuts and their tucked-in white undershirts- they weren’t cool. But the younger guys who were listening to Deep Purple and to Waylon Jennings, who drove muscle cars that we could hear coming down the block, who shrugged off the comments like “Why don’t you get a haircut?” — they were cool. And these guys that we knew and saw, alongside the men we saw in movies and TV and heard on the radio, formed our understanding of how to be cool and tough, how to be counterculture and Southern. That was what it was to be a working-class white kid in the South in the late 1970s and early ’80s, trying to pick up what the older guys were laying down.

Which leads me right into chapter three, “When in Doubt, Kick Ass,” about another paradigm that Lechner goes into: the Masculine South. Here, once again, we get examples to follow along with: Alabama governor George Wallace and the films Walking Tall and Deliverance. Wallace is a titanic figure in the realm of Southern mythology, who started his career as “the little fighting judge” then shifted his political path onto the route of sheer defiance, making the federal government his prime opponent. Lechner writes that the South, for Wallace, was “a place in which white supremacy was still unquestioned, the common man could still get ahead, and manly, socially sanctioned violence was necessary.” That third tenet went to the extreme in 1973’s Walking Tall, a fictionalized account of Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser’s fight against organized crime in rural McNairy County. This film was known as exceedingly violent, but a point was being made: sometimes a man has to kick the shit out of the people who are harming, or at least threatening, him or his loved ones. Pusser became a myth himself, though most Americans are actually familiar with the movie poster image of Joe Don Baker holding his big stick. Finally, there is Deliverance, a film known primarily for two scenes: the banjo picker and the brutal rape. But the story is about more than that, and Lechner takes a few pages to dive into it. By contrast to the hardscrabble farming Southerners of old, many Southern men had become suburbanites — thus, “emasculated” — by the 1970s. The four main characters were prime examples of that; even Lewis, the manliest of them, doesn’t survive the ordeal they endure on the north Georgia rapids that he insisted they undertake. The film opens with Lewis berating the three other men, calling them soft and challenging them to get off the couch and be outdoors, then they find that they are no match for the wilderness nor for the mountain people they encounter. These narratives follow the thread, writes Lechner, that modern Southerners are “overcivilized,” but still feel the need to fight, even just to prove that they are not completely unable to.

The fourth chapter moves back into the subject of music and into two more of my favorites: the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd. In his opening paragraphs to this chapter, Lechner describes the Allman Brothers as “hippie-like representatives of of an integrated New South,” while Skynyrd “took virile manliness” and “rambunctious southernness” and attached them to “white male freedom” and “white male rebellion.” Of course, one of the remarkable features of the former group was its inclusion of a black member, percussionist Jaimoe Johanson, which marked them as “liberated southerners and models of racial tolerance.” Coupling their biracial lineup with the fact that they carried the blues style forward, rather than simply trying to emulate it, led to “the group purportedly soothing model of southern culture.” On the other hand, Lechner quotes Robert Christgau of The Village Voice, who called Lynyrd Skynyrd “joyously unreconstructed.” We read here about the band’s rehearsal spaced called “Hell House” and their “macho ideal,” which involved fighting and misogyny. A few pages over, the band’s display of a huge rebel flag at their concerts is discussed, and Lechner quotes another writer who asserted that, for these guys, the symbolism was about embracing the idea of being redneck “as a badge of honor, a fashion statement, a gesture of resistance against high taxes, liberals, racial integration, women’s liberation, and hippies.” In these two groups, we’ve got two versions of the Macho South: one says that everything is cool and we can all get along, and another says that we don’t intend to get along with anybody.

In the fifth and final chapter comes Jimmy Carter, who served as a kinder-and-gentler US president in the late 1970s after serving as the kinder-and-gentler Georgia governor post-Lester Maddox. Carter was country boy and a peanut farmer from rural Plains, Georgia, probably one of the most unlikely presidents this country has ever had. Lechner’s chapter about him focuses on him filling the role of the “good Southern man,” using his “rustic image” to create Southern persona (and including his quirky but likeable family) to counteract the Vicious South’s “bad Southerner” and ingratiate voters. Here was The Waltons or The Andy Griffith Show come to life. As a candidate, Carter invited the media to watch him work on his farm, or if that didn’t interest him, they could be entertained by his vivacious mother, his eccentric sisters, or his loveable loser brother. This is one of Lechner’s only chapters where he gives much attention to women, and that attention is paid primarily to Jimmy Carter’s mother Lillian. We also read hear about Carter’s now-infamous “ Playboy gaffe” when he tried to make a nuanced statement about marital infidelity, which was taken too simplistically and too literally. So, Carter was a one-term president, perhaps because he couldn’t pull off the act twice, or perhaps because his opponent in 1980 was better at his version of squeaky-clean than Carter was at his.

The “Epilogue: Playing that Dead Band’s Song” takes only a few pages to sum it up then to carry us out. By the end of the 1970s and beginning of the ’80s, things had changed. On TV, Americans had tired of Andy Griffith and were watching Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas. At the movies, Smokey and the Bandit and Nashville were hits. On the campaign trail, Ronald Reagan gave his states’ rights speech in Neshoba, Mississippi, and it proved to be a precursor to the total reddening of the South. The allusion in the epilogue’s title is, of course, a reference to Lynyrd Skynyrd, which had lost about half of its original members in a plane crash in 1977; the song in question was “Sweet Home Alabama,” their anthem to Southern pride. In the book’s final paragraph, Lechner writes:

The South of the Mind still survives, long after 1980, of course; Americans continue to deploy its malleable narratives, so rich, and yet so unstable, in meaning (even within an individual conscience) to address concerns about their own identities and that of their country. When Americans are in the mood for some heavy soul searching, or need to wrestle with the most troubling issues of their times, the white South is always there to guide them, in all of its attractive, troubling, and fascinating manifestations.

Very true.

The South of the Mind is a worthwhile read, especially for a GenXer like me. Though the style is academic, which can be burdensome, the body of the argument constitutes a little over 160 pages, which is manageable. (The last fifty pages are end notes and an index.) I’ve read plenty of histories of the South, and sadly, most end at the period that Lechner examines. I was once told by an editor at a Southern university press, in response to a book proposal about the post-Civil Rights South, that nothing interesting happened after the movement ended and that no one cares about the South of the 1970s or ’80s. That was fifteen years ago. I disagreed then, and I still do now. Lechner’s book, and a few others, have shown me that some scholars, historians, and thinkers do regard this period in the same way I do-that lots of interesting things happened in the South after King’s death in 1968. I am thankful that Zachary Lechner has written about the Southern white men of this period as being more than racist thugs bent on violence, and without being an apologist or a defender. Some were awful, to be sure, but so many weren’t that to reduce all Southern men to Jimmy Carter’s “bad Southern man” is — when it happens — a damn shame.

Originally published at http://modernsouthernfolklore.com on October 19, 2023.