In Love with Defeat. H. Brandt Ayers
a uniquely un-American story, a drama played out in a third-world region as it progressed through each level of development to a mature, post-industrial society—with the consequent values won and lost. The term “third world” is more literal than metaphorical. In the mid-1930s, when I was born, the per capita income of Alabama was less than $1 a day. Only one generation has lived at and beyond the intersection of the Old and New South, experienced the demise of an old civilization, and tried to define a better one—transforming and being transformed by a hard economic climb from poverty to post-industrial plenty.
This is a very personal story of that generation, my generation. I was born into a now-extinct civilization, but have lived the story as one of the leaders of that constellation of social and political forces that came to be known as the New South movement. I have taken the measure of my people—finding both confusion and common cause—in the White House, throughout the South and from foreign venues. Mainly, however, I have witnessed and lived the story from the perspective of a small-town Alabama newspaper publisher. A county-seat town is an intimate angle from which to witness a new nation emerging, decade-by-decade. It was also a place best to feel the impact of a simultaneous event—the moment when two cultures, one white, with well-worn rituals of civic and political life, the other black, new to positions of influence and power, came together as strangers. This was a moment when the old leaders experienced the shock of self-recognition and when the new leaders behaved distressingly like the old ones—like people.
Much of this journey was chronicled in the pages of my family-owned newspaper, which, with independent journalism itself, is an endangered species. At the end of World War II, almost all daily newspapers were owned by a family. As this is written, there were fewer than 300 of approximately 1,500 dailies that were still owned by families, which means an especially intense connection between a family and a community. The human dynamic of the relationship between one family and an entire community is unusual: close and caring, but sometimes jarring and painful. The emotional strings of such a relationship are tuned more like a Jacha Heifetz violin than, say, a Pete Sampras tennis racquet. The give and take, anger, celebrations, frustration, joys, sorrows and satisfactions that pass between publisher and community are acutely sensitive. And it is precisely that sensitivity that gives a family newspaper its unique personality. It may be less objective than a chain newspaper, but it is more caring. It scolds, supports, consoles and chides. It hurts and is hurt, and it loves — like any slightly dysfunctional family.
This is natural, because the publisher of a family-owned newspaper is more than likely a native son. The Ayers family has published newspapers in Calhoun County for more than a century, from the late 19th century to the early 21st century. The publisher’s fate and feelings expand and contract with the rhythms of community life. It is this primary allegiance that a family-owned paper has to a place and its people that too often is missing in corporate journalism, and may explain its low esteem in the public’s mind. Family newspapers have passionate critics, too, mine no exception. To save our friends and critics, too, from uncaring corporate journalism, our family years ago passed up a cash offer of $50 million for sale of our two daily and four weekly papers, and have since pledged our stock to a foundation. The foundation will keep our dailies and weeklies local; and, with the University of Alabama, supports an institute to further the arts of community journalism.
This newspaper has also provided a window to the larger universe: the state, the region, the nation and the world. The region is especially important to this publisher. There are many Souths but the main fault-line is between past and present, between visions of an Old South or New South. For most of my life, I have been puzzled, even contemptuous of those who cling to the dry bones of the long-dead Confederacy, who made a shrine of the Lost Cause, in effect, worshipped defeat, but in later years I had to acknowledge that the great schism in the nation’s life ought to be memorialized and that there can be nobility in defeat. The innocent enjoyment of that heritage deserves respect. That being said, I have consistently spoken for those of my generation whose vision was future rather than past oriented. A consistent core philosophy connects us New South believers: Society benefits from bridges that the less fortunate can cross over to a good life. Dad put it this way in an article for a trade journal, words we quote daily on the editorial page flag, “A newspaper should be the attorney for the most defenseless among its subscribers.” Those who would close the bridges breed turmoil, cap a social volcano that someday must erupt.
The civil rights movement was one such eruption. It grew in volume from the distant thunder of Brown v. Board of Education my freshman year at the University of Alabama. It grew louder with the lunch counter sit-ins I witnessed as a young political reporter in North Carolina, where two governors showed creative leadership, and then in Washington where I covered Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department and the March on Washington. Back home, it reached a personal crescendo—a nightrider murder following racist rallies on the courthouse steps. A major crisis was averted by rare and courageous statesmanship by Anniston’s black and white leaders.
After the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the volcano began to cool. Looking back now, it seems as if the Old South disappeared “with deliberate speed” over the five years between 1965 and 1970, and where it had been, a wholly new place stood like a volcanic island, risen from the Gulf and the Atlantic. Even writers such as James Agee, Clarence Cason, William Faulkner and W. J. Cash could not have imagined this new civilization.
The first fruits of the new civilization astonished those of us born into the old one, but in time they became commonplace and the New South itself soon vanished. That is where the balance of my story ends, but the stunning cultural exclamation point of a black man as president requires an extended afterword.
1
Ancient Civilization Revisited
The civil rights movement cut through the center of my generation of white Southerners like a turbulent canyon river separating an ancient civilization from a newly minted one. Long before we could imagine that there was another side of the canyon, there was only the Old South. It amazes me now to think that there actually was such a place—a distant planet, blurred by time and space, where graces for a few and a universal insistence on common courtesy masked the reality that we were born to a backward, unhealthy, undereducated, third-world nation, governed by laws that spawned violence and misfortune. Poverty, pellagra, and prejudice were the three horsemen of that society. We didn’t have much but we had our pride. forget, hell, read Confederate battle flag bumper stickers. As an unconscious antidote to the threadbare hardness of our lives, we did have a lubricant of human community—courtesy. We yes-sirred and yes-ma’amed everybody from barbers and store clerks to parents and teachers. It is a fact that in the South you can say anything, anything at all, if you have the right prefix or suffix: “That sure is an ugly baby, bless his heart.”
When I was born in 1935 in Anniston, Alabama, on the second floor of the old Garner Hospital on South Leighton Avenue, Alabama was a third-world nation in a third-world region. The state’s per capita income was $214—less than a $1 a day. But a boy growing up in the small county-seat town of Anniston, cupped by the blue foothills of the Appalachians, had no sense that he belonged to an isolated, impoverished culture that was mocked by the educated, self-confident people who lived in the “Other” America.
The wilderness from which the model “new town” of Anniston was carved had enough ore and limestone to lure an industrial odd couple, Sam Noble, a Confederate munitions manufacturer from Rome, Georgia, and Daniel Tyler, a Union general from Connecticut. The chance 1872 meeting between the two men in Charleston combined the main elements of the New South formula devised by Henry Grady, the peppery Atlanta editor. Grady reasoned that a region lying in the ashes of defeat, dehydrated by a capital drought, had to import capital in order to rise up as an industrial power. Yankee wealth matched with Southern sense of the geography, geology, and culture was Grady’s formula for creating a New South. Noble and Tyler turned out to be corporate visionaries. From their Woodstock Iron Works my hometown was born as an elaborately planned model city. Grady was excited to see his concept taking shape in bricks and mortar, and confident enough to invest in the company.
The partnership added