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Region, Ethnic Group, and American Writers: From “Non-Southern” and “Non-Ethnic” to Ludwig Lewisohn; or the Ethics of Wholesome Provincialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Werner Sollors
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Extract

In 1785 a writer who used the pen name “Celadon” (singer) tried to clarify the meaning of regions in America by making them one with ethnic groups. The author of the small pamphlet The Golden Age; or, Future Glory of North-America Discovered by an Angel to Celadon in Several Entertaining Visions contemplated the future of America from a mountain overlooking the whole continent. He describes himself in a state of rapture when

the Angel recalled my attention by a gentle touch on my side, and pointing his finger a little to the south-west, Celadon, says he, do you see yonder long valley. … That whole region you may call Savagenia: It being designed for the future habitation of your now troublesome Indians. — And that other valley. … It lies toward the north-west … This you may call Nigrania: It being allotted for the Negroes to dwell there, when the term of their vassalage is come to a period. — And in all those vast spaces westward to the great ocean, there may be seats hereafter for sundry foreign nations. — There may be a French, a Spanish, a Dutch, an Irish, an English, &c. yea, a Jewish State here in process of time. — And all of them united in brotherly affection, will at last form the most potent empire on the face of the earth (pp. 11–12).

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 9 , October 1984 , pp. 441 - 462
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

NOTES

1. See Glazer, Nathan, “Universalisation of Ethnicity,” Encounter 2 (1975), 16.Google Scholar

2. Blu, Karen, “Race and Ethnicity: Changing Symbols of Dominance and Hierarchy in the United States,” Anthropological Quarterly 52 (04 1979), 81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Reed, John Shelton, The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1974), p. 117, n. 23.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., p. 60.

5. Ibid., p. 6.

6. Ibid., p. 10. See also Reed's entry in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 944–8Google Scholar; Tindall, George B., The Ethnic Southerners (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State Universigy Press, 1976Google Scholar; Killian, Lewis M., White Southerners (New York: Random House, 1970).Google Scholar

7. Harvard Encyclopedia, p. 893.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., p. 888.

9. Ibid., p. 894.

10. Powell, John W., “Physiographic Regions of the United States,”Google Scholar: in National Geographic Society, The Physiography of the United States (New York, 1896)Google Scholar, quoted in Jensen, Merrill, ed., Regionalism in America (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1952), p. 84Google Scholar. Powell apparently is also the man who introduced the term acculturation into the English language.

11. Royce, Josiah, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems (New York: McMillan, 1908; reprinted by Books for Libraries Press, 1967), pp. 57–108Google Scholar. Subsequent references to this work in text will be cited as RQ, followed by the page number.

12. In our days, Ronald Reagan supports the states against the federal government — which he is heading — and tells Time magazine (January 5, 1981, p. 30); “And now (laughing) this monster the states have created is acting as the master over the states.”

13. Bourne, Randolph, “Trans-National America,” in Hansen, Olaf, ed., The Radical Will: Randolph Bourne—Selected Writings, 1911–1918 (New York: Urizen, 1977), pp. 248–64Google Scholar. On pp. 56 and 264 Hansen notes Royce's influence. Subsequent references to this work will be cited in parentheses in the text as “TNA,” followed by the page number.

14. This ironic phenomenon, which we observed earlier in studies of the South and Russians, has been scrutinized by John Higham, Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Atheneum, 1975), pp. 196–230Google Scholar, and by Gleason, Philip, “American Identity and Americanization,” in Harvard Encyclopedia, pp. 31–58.Google Scholar

15. Odum, Howard W. and Moore, Harry Estill, American Regionalism: A Cultural-Historical Approach to National Integration (New York: H. Holt, 1938).Google Scholar

16. Howard W. Odum, quoted in Vernon Carstensen, “The Development and Application of Regional-Sectional Concepts, 1900–1950,” in Jensen, , Regionalism in America, pp. 112–13.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., p. 113, Odum, , “The Promise of Regionalism,”Google Scholar in Jensen, , Regionalism in America, p. 399.Google Scholar

18. Ibid., p. 403.

19. Ibid., p. 401.

20. Potter, David, “The Historian's Use of Nationalism,” in Fehrenbacher, Don E., History and American Society: Essays of David M. Potter (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 75.Google Scholar

21. For Potter's answer to the relationship of sectionalism and the Civil War, see ibid., pp. 86–7, and Potter, David, The South and Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

22. See Bercovitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)Google Scholar and Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

23. This may be one reason for the following: the horrifying sense of “un-South,” resembling the quality of “un-American”; the aestheticization of ethnic and regional life; the pervasiveness of moralism in ethnic and regional studies; the individualization of region and ethnic group in such a way that one might speak of “auto-regional-biography” or call this essay “The American Self as Region and Ethnic Group.”

24. Adamic, Louis, “Toward Organic Changing,” in What's Your Name? (New York: Harper & Bros., 1942), p. 22.Google Scholar

25. Lewisohn, Ludwig, Up Stream: An American Chronicle (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922), p. 51Google Scholar. Subsequent references to this work will be cited in parentheses in the text as UStr, followed by the page number.

26. I chose this formulation in analogy to the popular exhortation of the 1950s to “worship in a church of your choice.”

27. Chametzky, Jules, “Styron's Sophie's Choice, Jews and Other Marginals, and the Mainstream,”Google Scholar the preceding article in this volume.

28. Lewisohn, Ludwig, Cities and Men (New York: Harper & Bros., 1927).Google Scholar

29. Lewisohn, Ludwig, Expression in America (New York: Harper & Bros., 1932). pp. 297–8Google Scholar. On p. 418 he also mentions Bourne.