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struggle for social justice against economic exploitation, racism, male
supremacy, and the atomization of social life."
In
view of this insistence,
it seems appropriate to read Genovese's treatment of the achievement
and limitation of the Southern tradition as basically constituting the
drama of a sympathetic insider's appraisal of the situation of the
American left and a sympathetic outsider's appraisal of the situation of
the American right, or we might say, particularly of its Southern wing.
Or, to put it another way, it seems fitting to regard
The Southern
Tradition
as the drama of the author's quarrel with himself about his role
in contemporary American history.
The critique of the character of the left in this country through ref–
erence to the history of the South is of course nothing new in Gen–
ovese's writings. As he points out in
The Southern Tradition,
he began a
long time ago to urge that in order to rescue itself from its association
with totalitarianism, Stalinist or otherwise, the left might well turn to a
constructive view of the history of the region of the United States that
has most consistently exhibited a strong anti-capitalist bias. But, we de–
tect, a new note of urgency informs this prescription in that his defini–
tion of Southern history now appears clearly to involve Genovese's need
to define his own identity as a self-conscious actor in history. As an his–
torian who, beguiled by the "Left's rosy view of human nature, never
dreamed that the Soviet Union would suddenly collapse," he has come
to feel that he has the obligation to answer "a few questions" about
why he spent a good part of his life "in a political movement that piled
up tens of millions of corpses to sustain a futile cause and hideous politi–
cal regimes."
Although
The Southern Tradition
is not the place Genovese has cho–
sen to meet this obligation in any precise way, we sense its burden in his
heightened sensitivity to the fallibility of the tradition he offers as a cor–
rective to the socialist movement. He is, to be sure, anxiously aware that
the very source of Southern tradition, the historical culture of the white
South, is disappearing in the "modernization" that is transforming the
South. While "the transformation has much to recommend it, especially
with respect to long overdue if incomplete justice for black people," it is
exacting a price "northerners as well as southerners, blacks as well as
whites, will rue having to pay and need not pay": a "neglect of, or con–
tempt for, the history of Southern whites, without which some of the
more distinct and noble features of American national life must remain
incomprehensible."
The specific "noble features" of the national life - the noble ideals,
Genovese would seem to mean - that are "incomprehensible" to most
