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Throughout its long and often tragic history, the South was looked upon as an arena that endured much and learned little. Could it be that in many ways it can now teach the nation something about how to live? The idea can easily be exaggerated, but there is truth in it. The fact was foreshadowed by the South's agrarian romantics of the 1930s, who in a sense anticipated the "greening of America," the new emphasis on human values and environment. Later the harshly segregated South showed the rest of the nation that it was possible to change despite deeply held prejudices —and to achieve at least the beginnings of racial amity. Other parts of the U.S., without consciously turning to the South, began to long for some of its values: family, community, roots. There was a new, only half-understood bond of sympathy between the only part of America ever to have lost a war and other Americans who had met their first defeat in Viet Nam. Summing up the Southern ability to outlast adversity, William Faulkner declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: "I decline to accept the end of man... I believe that man will not merely endure, he will prevail." Most Americans, whether they knew those words or not, were suddenly more ready to receive their meaning.
With the curse of racism beginning to lift, one can perceive a kind of liberality. Notes Sheldon Hackney, president of Tulane University: "Traditionally, the South has been quite tolerant. Localities tolerate the village atheist arid the lonely radical. The family tolerates. The South, more than other places, honors the strong individual stand, the person who says what he believes."
In his classic The Mind of the South, W.J. Cash considered the new skyscrapers and pondered: "Softly, do you not hear behind that the gallop of Jeb Stuart's cavalrymen?" At times the hoofbeats of a defeated army are still audible, even on the courthouse squares, even in the halls of Congress, even in the cadences of Jimmy Carter.
But they are soon drowned out by a new beat—the frank clang of cash registers, of buildings going up, of dirt roads being paved, of high school and college bands exhorting their black and white football stars to victory, of new leaders with old courtesies, of expectations that no longer seem visionary or Utopian.
"The past is still with us," admits Dean Rusk, "but it no longer sets the tone." It is the future that seems to inhabit the South. It is a rather surprising place for the future to be, and the region still wrestles uncomfortably with it, amid fears of homogenization.
Industrialization and the growth of cities have already brought attendant blight: air pollution, traffic congestion, billboarded highways and garish fast-food enterprises. To Southern Journalist John Egerton (The Americanization of Dixie), "The modern, acquisitive, urban, industrial, post-segregationist, on-the-make South, its vices nationalized, its virtues evaporating if not already dissipated, is coming back with a bounce in its step, like a new salesman on the route, eager to please, intent on making it."