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The Value of Southern Idealism.
A BRIEF ADDRESS OF WELCOME
..TO…………..
THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
AND......
ཪིམས་
THE AMERICAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
on the evening of December 29th, 1903,
.BY...
· EDWIN ANDERSON ALDERMAN,
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President of Tulane University.
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THE VALUE OF SOUTHERN
IDEALISM.
I
GIVE you a very hearty welcome,
gentlemen of the American Histori-
cal and American Economic Asso-
ciations, to the lower South, to the City
of New Orleans, and to Tulane Uni-
versity. Your presence here adds a
certain charm and distinction to this
gracious holiday season. We, to whom
this city is home, desire to make it a
real home for you, though the roof-tree
that shelters you, and those near to you,
may be many leagues away. We are
glad to have you here, not only for your-
selves, but because we believe that you
can help us to deal wisely with our
problems, which are many and grave.
The historian and the economist are to
me the most interesting of men. Who-
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The Value of Southern Idealism
we
ever else may be having a dull time in
these days, they assuredly, are not. No
men that I can call to mind are having
quite so much intellectual joy out of
contemporary civilization unless
may except the President of the United
States and the Emperor of Germany.
Through you civilization is engaged in
looking in upon itself in a search for
Your
the laws of human progress.
laboratory is humanity, and your aim a
state of society in which men can make
the most of themselves. The task is
an appalling one, but I believe the names
of some of you will be held in honor by
men, because of this aim, when the
more dramatic figures which you study
as they stagger under the burden of
their millions, will be quite forgotten
save as mere social phenomena.
You have come, I think, to a very fas-
cinating portion of the most fascinating
nation on earth, considered from the
standpoint of the historian and the
economist. Certainly, nowhere else on
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The Value of Southern Idealism
!
earth is there offered to thoughtful men
a more interesting study in social self-
realization or in the course of this great
democratic experiment. New Orleans,
like all other cities, has not learned the
art of governing itself perfectly, to put
it mildly, or of keeping itself clean and
making itself beautiful, or of spending
its money with perfect wisdom, but it
is a community of very real individuality
and distinction. It goes back to the
dim beginnings. It is a very palimpsest
of the struggle of the races for the New
World. It has ways of its own. It has
the nervous system and the emotions of
a metropolis. The noble lines of a won-
derful human experience are visible on
its face-experience of sorrow and loss
and disaster, of battle and siege and
pestilence, of joy and pride and achieve-
ment. No Francis Parkman or Theo-
dore Roosevelt has told the story of the
'winning of the Southwest,' how it was
won, how extended, and how defended.
I have often wondered how the his-
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The Value of Southern Idealism
torians could let the Southwest so much
alone, while they told of lesser things,
for its story is a moving tale of epic in
cident and epic result. Great deeds
have been done here. Here an empire
was born, and here a great battle was
fought which gave a hero to democracy,
and thus gave to democracy its oppor-
tunity.
The New Orleans that you honor with
your presence, to-day, is a community
of boundless hope, of almost joyous
self-reliance, of an exhilarating realiza-
tion of independence and self-conscious-
ness. The Southern seaboard is com-
ing into its own. The balance of com-
mercial activity is tipping, surely,
toward this American Mediterranean.
This spirit of hope is more subtly ex-
pressed, however, than in the roar of
mighty bull campaigns, or in the volume
of export statistics.
The divine phil-
osophy of defeat is revealed in this
spirit. It is a kind of mental exalta
tion, marking the reconstructive work
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The Value of Southern Idealism
✓
-1
of men who have brought the city
through the most thorough-going social
revolution of modern times by the use.
of such empire-building tools as pa-
tience, grimness, energy and faith.
The spirit of this metropolis is the
spirit of the whole region. For forty
years the South was practically another
nation, building its social order on the
basis of an inherited economic miscon-
ception. For another forty years it
has been striving to retain its best tra-
ditions, its idealism and its simplicity,
to recover the industrialism in com-
merce and education which it had lost,
and to achieve nationalization in politics
and liberalism in opinion. The South
has regained the spirit of industrialism
with which it started in the early
days. Many details remain
remain to be
worked out, but the spirit is here.
I see it in the ideals of our youth. I
hear it in their speech. Their ambitions
reflect it, their dreams move about it.
Twenty years from now the old patri-
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The Value of Southern Idealism
archal South will be a fierce industrial
region. By industrialism, I do not mean
commercialism. Commercialism is a
mere sordid theory of life. Industrialism
is the scientific mastery of the raw
material and its wise distribution ac-
cording to the laws of trade. Thus
considered, industrialism is a mighty
and moral part of the movement of
society. When the practice of indus-
trialism catches up with the spirit,
politics will be nationalized and thought
liberalized in the South, for the economic
structure of society is largely respon-
sible for its ideals.
Our real problem, therefore, is to try
to industralize our society without com-
mercializing its soul. I wonder if the
thing is possible?
The home of John C. Calhoun is
now the site of Clemson College, a
thorough-going, intensely practical Agri-
cultural and Mechanical College.
From the pillared gallery of the home
of the grim champion of the "staple
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The Value of Southern Idealism
x
states' theory one may see the stern,
unlovely looking, but forceful buildings
of Clemson-the dynamos whirr, young
men in overalls work at the forges, and
the black smoke rises. These vivid con-
trasts form the most dramatic bit of
symbolism in the land.
The tragic, fundamental fact in South-
ern life is an economic fact-the pres-
ence here in large numbers of the Afri-
can as a great economic factor. There
has not been a moment in sixty years,
largely owing to his presence, that the
South has not passionately subscribed
to one of two or three great political
dogmas or doctrines. We are, as a con-
sequence, the sturdiest political meta-
physicians of our race, with a capacity
for political solidarity that is almost
distressing. For sixty years the South
stood ready to die, and did die, for the
doctrine of State sovereignty. It now
sees that that doctrine and more especi-
ally, slavery, as a labor system, stood
opposed to the spirit of the modern
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The Value of Southern Idealism
world. To-day it would die with even
more amazing oneness of mind for the
doctrine of racial integrity or the
separateness of the two races. It be-
lieves this latter doctrine is in accord
with the spirit of the modern world.
This doctrine of separateness does not
mean race hatred. There is a certain
amount of race hatred here, of course,
and there are reasons for this, inherent
in elemental human nature, but the best
Southern people not only do not hate
the negro, but come nearer to having
affection for him than any other people
on earth, and they hold this faith in a
spirit of common sense and justice and
sympathy and helpfulness to the black
race. They are too wise not to realize
that posterity will judge them accord-
ing to the wisdom they use in this great
concern. They are too just not to
know that there is but one thing to do
with a human-being, and that thing is
to give him a chance, and that it is a
solemn duty of the white man to see
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The Value of Southern Idealism
X
that the negro gets his chance in every-
thing save social equality and political
control. They believe that any form
of peonage or helotry would be a greater
curse to us than chattel slavery, and
they will have none of it. They be-
lieve that the forward race must join
the foremost of the backward race in
finding the right sort of training and
education for these backward folks.
They believe that vast ignorance is a
vast menace, and they will fight it in
white or black. In the meantime the
white must control our political life,
and the negro must build his own
society. The Southern people believe
with their usual intensity that it is the
duty of civilization always to protect
the higher groups against the deterio-
rating influence of the lower groups.
This does not mean that the lower
should be prevented from rising, but
that it should not be permitted to break
down the higher. The improvement
and progress of the backward nations
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The Value of Southern Idealism
and races should all come by improving
the condition of their own group, but
should never be permitted to come at
the expense of the higher or more ad-
vanced group, nation or race. Social
equality or political control would mean
deterioration of the advanced group,
and the South is serving the Nation
when it says it shall not be so. But, I
am not here to discuss this question.
Discussion of it has become a national
disease, and should be quarantined
against, for it is getting hysterical and
dangerous. The doctrinaire and maga-
zine writer thought they had settled it
thirty years ago. How foolish seems
their talk to-day! My prescription is
"silence and slow time," faith in the
South and wise training of both white
and black. I do not mean by this to
echo the old sensitive cry, "Let the
South Alone;" but to emphasize Mr.
Cleveland's idea that if the best people
of the South cannot handle this ques-
tion, it is impossible to handle it at all.
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The Value of Southern Idealism
X
The fundamental idea, I have to give
you, however, this evening, sinks deeper
than all this. A people who hold to
high political doctrines, which do not
admit of compromise in their minds,
gain in a genius for intensity of convic-
tion what they lose in liberalism. They
become idealists-possibly martyrs to
an idea. Great virtues, like unsordid-
ness, unselfishness, simplicity, patriotic
devotion come to dwell within them.
They cease to fear anything but denial
of their doctrines. You cannot frighten
them with poverty, oppression, obscur-
You cannot
ity or any other terror.
cajole or deceive them. They become
single-minded and self-centered. It is
plain to me that by the very tragedy of
its history the South is the most ideal-
istic section in America to-day. New
England was forty years ago. Indus-
trialism has diminished idealism there,
though not moral persistence, or love of
order, or high-mindedness, or a certain
passion for efficiency. The South to-day
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The Value of Southern Idealism
wants wealth and success and power, and
is hot-footed on the trail of these things,
but it would imperil all for its dogma. It
is still a land of enthusiasm, loyalties,
principles and slogans. It still loves a
good, generous phrase like "the consent
of the governed." No other people
except the French will so quickly rally
around a phrase, or a doctrine, or a
song, or an attractive personality like
the Americans of those Southern States.
Now, I believe that America needs
this intense idealism of the South,
stamped into its life by its sad, strange
history. The nation should thank God
that it is here, for, after all, it is a
spiritual force needed to help combat
vulgar strength and coarse power, and
a vast indifferentism to finer issues. I
have said that industrialism will change.
this idealism, and so it will, but it is too
deep for destruction or submersion.
For generations it will play about some
phase of national life, for sectionalism,
as philosophy or a creed, has gone for-
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The Value of Southern Idealism
ever, unless it shall be galvanized into
life again by the harmonious co-opera-
tion of Senator Tillman and the Union
League Club. The South was traveling
fast toward the conception of national
unity, for which it stood so grandly in
the early days, when, somehow, it got
shunted off, but it will return to that.
At least, so runs my dream, and so
points my logic. Whenever this vast
grip of Southern idealism takes fast
hold of the idea of national unity, of
national destiny, of national hope, the
great Republic that we all love and
count it a glory to serve, will feel its
buoyant power as men in a valley feel
the tonic of the upper altitudes. Let
the nation then cherish this idealism
which it sometimes thinks of as paro-
chialism. It lies in my thought as a
benign national asset, albeit a hidden
treasure to many, which, when the
nation shall become one nation indeed,
may, perhaps, be the resistless force in
the compact whole powerful enough to
realize the hopes and dreams with which
democracy started upon its great course,
I wish for you, gentlemen of the two
Associations, a session of freedom of
speech, of wealth of learning and of much
pleasure and profit.
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