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from the world more than did an Administration dominated by the fiscal
conservatism and small-mindedness of men like George
H~mphrey
and "Engine Charley" Wilson. This is all the more likely since Com–
munism is no longer confined to Stalin's highly limited, paranoid isola–
tionism. And can anyone foretell the reaction here at home, or the
situation abroad, once the Chinese Communists gain nuclear weapons?
While we and the Soviet Union (abetted by the French) are running
an accelerated arms race, discontented groups within each of the two
super powers or their allies help provoke their opposite numbers in the
adversary country and thus lend justification to a program of increased
militancy at home and abroad.
In this perspective, it would appear that in the earlier essay Mr.
Glazer and I may have underestimated to some degree the impact of
foreign policy and with such issues as "who lost China" in support–
ing McCarthyism. But what I still would emphasize is that we deal here,
not with foreign affairs in the abstract, but with specifically American
reactions to solutions that must be less than total solutions, or indeed to
any ambiguous and inevitably tragic outcomes. As C. Vann Woodward
pointed out a few years ago, only the South is "un-American" in having
suffered defeat, in having lacked the extrapolative dynamic of industrial–
ism, and in having gained in these ways a sense of the limits on human
action. Yet, despite much talk of states' rights and individual freedom,
the South does not today seem aware of the wisdom of these limits.
It has certainly made no effort to control its own booming industrializa–
tion, nor its combination of sectional irredentism and nationalist bel–
ligerence. And while before the Second World War the South was per–
haps the most pro-British, pro-free trade, and interventionist part of
the country, today it may be the most tariff minded, the most anti–
British (whenever Britain tries to moderate the Cold War), and in
addition, the most hostile to Latin American revolution.*
As W.
J.
Cash angrily reminds his readers in
The Mind of the
South,
the South was not even before the Civil War the stable social
order, governed by Tidewater gentry, that magnolia mythology pre–
sents. The Southern white college students, as various surveys have
shown; seldom share either the prejudices or the passions of their vocal
*
The South (not counting Texas) was also anti-McCarthy, while today
it
offers
to support various Right Wing crusaders who, whatever their nominal political
color, are equally opposed to the Democratic Party of President Kennedy.
I recognize that the voting South is a minority, and that those who
claim
to speak for the South speak for a minority; the entire South has changed less
rapidly than its articulate and organized cadres.
