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Patriotism may be out of favor nowadays in much of America, but it flourishes in the South. Rusk finds that "patriotism is not just jingoism down here. It is affection for the country and its values." To the Southern spirit, that affection includes a deep, often uncritical respect for the military. With good reason—the South receives income from military establishments scattered throughout its states; there are 15 major bases in Georgia alone. But income certainly cannot account for the exuberant displays of flags, the military spirit at football stadiums, the parades of veterans in freshly pressed uniforms. The military tradition in the South goes back to the Civil War. Says University of Georgia Historian Numan Bartley: "The Confederate army came out of the war with a great reputation which grew into mythology." That mythology took hold in family stories, in poetry like Allen Tate's Ode to the Confederate Dead:
Turn your eyes to the immoderate
past,
Turn to the inscrutable infantry
rising
Demons out of the earth.
A devotion to the country and service grew in the great military academies, Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel of South Carolina. Recalls Atlanta Journal Editor Jack Spalding: "There was a time when all Southerners understood the need for military force. It may be educated out of them in places, but there are still the basics here. We are close to the soil, more religious, and know what guns are for and why they must be used sometimes."
The well-kept marble statues of Confederate soldiers in almost every town square in the South testify to the love of militant lost causes—a love that has sometimes been misplaced. Long after the Viet Nam War had fallen out of favor with Northern conservatives, it still received support from the South. In the final days of Watergate, when the rest of the nation had been convinced of Nixon's guilt, the President still garnered sympathy and exhortations from Southerners who urged him to "Hang in there."
But the allegiance to lost causes has abated. The present Southern emotion is a sense of imminent victory—over circumstances, poverty and history. The feeling of inferiority is evaporating. Jimmy Carter, whatever the outcome in November, has already given the area a surge of confidence. Throughout the South there is a fresh appreciation of place and love of the land, an almost metaphysical feeling that they are moving at the heart of the world.
Even greater than pride in place is a strongly developed sense of family—not merely the nuclear one, but the broadsword virtues of the clan. This is partly because many Southern families have lived in the same territory for five or six generations, growing, spreading, developing deeper ties. To a largely rootless and mobile nation, children or grandchildren of the immigrant experience, this familial feeling seems foreign. Explains Spalding: "It is comforting for a Southerner, in a strange, hostile and wicked world, to know who he is, that someone will send his daughter a wedding present or come to his funeral."