In Love with Defeat. H. Brandt Ayers
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In Love with Defeat
The Making of a Southern Liberal
H. Brandt Ayers
Foreword by Governor William F. Winter
NewSouth Books
Montgomery
Also by H. Brandt Ayers
You Can’t Eat Magnolias (1972) Co-Editor
Bicentennial Portrait of the American People: Southern Chapter (1972) Contributor
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2013 by H. Brandt Ayers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN 978-1-58838-277-1
ebook ISBN: 978-1-60306-107-0
LCCN: 2012014900
All photographs courtesy of the author except Willie and Lestine Brewster, P7, bottom right, copyright Bettmann/CORBIS and author photograph, front cover, by Jeffrey Kinney, EA Photography
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.
To my editor, my inspiration, my love, my wife Josephine, and to all those other lonely souls who have wished for their beloved South to become fully a distinctive part of the nation.
Contents
1 - Ancient Civilization Revisited
2 - Growing Up: Cracks in the Cocoon
3 - A Civilization Dies—Unnoticed
6 - Meanwhile, Back Home . . .
8 - Stranger’s Return to a Familiar Place
10 - A New Civilization Aborning
15 - The Day Sisyphus Lost His Job
“A depressingly high rate of self destruction prevails among those who ponder about the South and put down their reflections in books. A fatal frustration seems to come from the struggle to find a way through the unfathomable maze formed by tradition, caste, race and poverty. In view of this record, for reasons of personal comfort, if for no other, the inclination to look for a ray of hope in the progress of the South is strong . . . Despair need not be the only outcome.”
— V. O. Key, in Southern Politics in State and Nation
“I don’t hate it,” Quentin said quickly, at once, immediately. “I don’t hate it, he said. ‘I don’t hate it,’ he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark. I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”
— William Faulkner, in Absalom, Absalom!
William F. Winter
There have been countless efforts by Southern and non-Southern writers—some highly regarded and many less so—attempting to interpret the uniquely complex region that is the American South. That remains an endlessly challenging task. It may be an impossible one. As an eighty-nine-year-old fifth-generation Mississippian, I have spent half of my life trying to figure it out.
In this insightful memoir, Brandt Ayers has come as close as anybody ever has to explaining who we Southerners are and why we act as we do. In addition, he has provided us a personally experienced commentary on many of the fascinating personalities and events that have shaped the region for better or worse over the last half-century.
As a newspaper reporter, editor, and publisher, he has been where the action was, but he has been much more than simply an astute observer and chronicler of the Southern scene. As a founder of the influential LQC Lamar Society to be a voice of reason in the 1960s, and as confidant and counselor to progressive Southern leaders including two presidents, he has helped make the South more prudent and responsible than it otherwise might have been.
I can testify out of my own bittersweet involvement in the often brutal electoral politics of my state of Mississippi how difficult it was to provide moderating influence in the closed society of which we were a part.
It was on a September evening in 1962 in my hometown of Jackson when I saw the frightening power of politically incited fear and prejudice overwhelm an entire state. I was there when then-Governor Ross Barnett walked on the field at halftime of a University of Mississippi football game and harangued thousands of well-meaning, Bible-reading, white Mississippians into believing that the sky would fall if one black man was admitted to Ole Miss. I finally understood how the calamitous Civil War had started a hundred years before.
How did this happen again a century later, we ask ourselves. It happened partly because not enough wise leaders and thoughtful people after the Civil War understood the immensity of the reconciliation that had to take place between the North and the South and between the races.