Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Scot A. French
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DOI: 10.1353/scu.1995.0049
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In planning our conference on social memory and southern history, one question
arose again and again: What is social memory?
Good question.
Social memory is a concept used by historians and others to explore the
connection between social identity and historical memory. It asks how and why
diverse peoples come to think of themselves as members of a group with a shared
(though not necessarily agreed upon) past: Hatfields and McCoys, southerners
and northerners, blacks and whites, natives and immigrants, Americans all. Some
historians use the term "collective memory," placing the emphasis on the internalization of group identities. I prefer the term "social memory" because it calls
attention to the social contexts in which people shape their group identities and
debate their conflicting perceptions of the past.
The concept of social memory is relatively new to the historical profession. It builds on recent theoretical developments in sociology, anthropology,
literary criticism, and psychology. In 1989, the Journal ofAmerican History devoted
an entire issue to the theme of "Memory and American History," noting the
recent surge of scholarly interest in the subject. After surveying the literature in
other disciplines, editor David Thelen laid out a research agenda for historians.
"The historical study of memory," he wrote, "would be the study of how families,
larger gatherings of people, and formal organizations selected and interpreted
identifying memories to serve changing needs. It would explore how people
together searched for common memories to meet present needs, how they first
recognized such a memory and then agreed, disagreed, or negotiated over its
meaning, and finally how they preserved and absorbed that meaning into their
ongoing concerns." Thelen saw the study of memory opening new fields of
inquiry for historians. For too long historians had dismissed memory as a poor
substitute for history, a partial or distorted version of what had really happened.
The study of memory would reacquaint historians with the ways in which non-
historians thought about the past, the ways in which they talked about history
and used it to make sense of the world around them.1
10Southern Cultures
leable guide to the past." While I agree that historians are guided by a strict set of
rules and conventions for writing about the past, I would argue that the stories
they tell have much in common with the stories told by nonhistorians. In my
view, history is a genre of memory, not just the detached arbiter of it. As professional historians, we tend to favor history over less "disciplined" forms of memory such as fiction, folklore, and autobiography. Yet history is no less malleable
than other guides to the past; new sources, methodologies, and social concerns
allow for constant revision of the stories we tell. By the same token, Hollywood
filmmakers and Disney Imagineers look to history for inspiration and legitimation
while adhering to their own sets of rules and conventions. History feeds off other
forms of memory, just as they feed off of history. I hope the papers presented in
this volume will shed some light on the similarities and differences between history and other genres of memory.
We conceived of this national graduate student conference as a way to
look at southern history from a new perspective. And yet, a skeptic might legiti-
mately ask: Is this perspective really new? The study of changing historical interpretations sounds much like professional historiography, which first evolved into
a modern sociology of knowledge in the twenties and thirties. The study of popular images sounds strikingly similar to the myth-and-symbol studies first popularized in the fifties and sixties. And the study of historical "narratives," with its
evocation of lit-crit theory, sounds like old-fashioned intellectual history retooled
for the postmodern age. Perhaps a review of the relevant literature will help clarify some of the similarities and differences between what we call "social memory"
and previous approaches to the subject.
The earliest scholarly analyses of the link between social identity and
southern history focused on the willful distortion of the truth about the southern
past, the self-aggrandizement of one group at the expense of another. Social critics with strong southern allegiances charged that propagandists had distorted
southern history for their own selfish purposes. The debate intensified in the
1930s as the South, officially designated as "the nation's number one economic
problem," was subjected to scrutiny from without and within. To tell the story of
the South's past was to identify the source of its present malaise; only the proper
diagnosis would yield the proper remedy. Taking science as their model, profes-
sional historians and social critics spoke passionately about the need for a dispassionate history of the South. At stake, they argued, was the health and prosperity of the region and its people.
In his contribution to the 1930 Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand, Vanderbilt historian Frank Lawrence Owsley complained that southern memories of
the Civil War and Reconstruction were based largely on northern propaganda,
despite the efforts of southern-born scholars to set the record straight. Northern-
ers, in effect, had colonized southern thought, using northern textbooks and
northern schoolteachers to wage a "second war of conquest." Southern children
grew up believing that the South "had no history, or that its history was tainted
with slavery and rebellion" and must be repudiated. Owsley set out to debunk
what he called the "Northern legend" of the sectional conflict and replace it with
his own authoritative account based on unbiased scholarship. He described the
Civil War as "an irrepressible conflict" between two civilizations, the agrarian
South and an expanding commercial-industrial North. He called the issue of slavery "a red herring" introduced by Abraham Lincoln and other partisan figures to
clothe northern self-interest in "the robes of morality." Owsley praised the work of
several southern writers who had challenged the "Northern legend" in recent
years. "Not all the Southern minds, fortunately, were conquered by the Northern conquest," Owsley wrote, explaining his own narrow escape. For Owsley,
southern intellectuals held the key to the regeneration of the southern people
and the survival of the southern way of life. As educated men, proud of the southern agrarian tradition, they would take their stand against the willful distortion of
their history and the obliteration of their identity by hostile outsiders.3
In 1935, the black scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois offered a similar
12Southern Cultures
ican culture embodied in the myths of "Cavalier" and "Yankee." He linked the
paired myths to the search for an ideal "national character" that would combine
the best qualities from all of the regions and ensure the survival of the republic.
Ironically, the popularization and political mobilization of these myths con-
tributed to a very real sectional conflict and helped to bring on the Civil War.
Taylor measured the popularity of the myths by the frequency of their appearance
in popular literature, an innovative use of source materials. He explained their
persistence long after the Civil War by lodging them in a shared "national character" rather than a dull or brooding southern mind.6
C. Vann Woodward, the preeminent southern historian of the era, welcomed the shift in scholarly emphasis from southern mythology to national
mythmaking. In a 1958 article entitled "The Search for Southern Identity," Woodward complained that most, if not all, of the South's cherished myths had been
debunked, leaving the "myth-denuded" southerner in danger of subscribing to
national myths. Woodward urged his fellow southerners to hold on to their mem-
While Woodward saw little more to be gained from the study of southern
myths, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill historian George Tindall saw
the study of mythology as "a new frontier in Southern history." In a 1964 essay
Tindall argued that "the various mythical images of the South have yet to be
subjected to the kind of broad and imaginative analysis that has been applied to
the idea of the West." Tindall suggested that historians move beyond the
debunking of myths to a broader understanding of their social and cultural significance. He urged historians to build upon the conceptual framework established by anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, and literary critics. Tindall
proceeded to suggest some of the mythical images of the South that historians
might analyze: The Pro-slavery South, the States Rights South, the Fighting
South, the Lazy South, the South of Jazz and Blues, the Liberal South of the
Interracial Movement, the White Supremacist South, etc. His list of mythical
Souths went on and on. Tindall did not explain what made these images of the
South mythical; all of them had some basis in empirical reality, he noted, yet all
were somehow inadequate or misleading. The task of the historian, as Tindall
saw it, was to point out the "blind spots" in these popular perceptions of the
South, to call attention to those features of the southern past that were missing
or obscured. Tindall assumed that historians could see the big picture; their professional training and scholarly detachment enabled them to step outside their
own culture and gaze back at it with a critical eye.8
14Southern Cultures
mention Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Patrick Henry, they just
swoon, you know, with patriotism," Malcolm X told a Harlem audience in 1965.
"But they don't realize that in the sight of George Washington, you were a sack of
potatoes. Youyeswere a sack of potatoes, a barrel of molasses, you amounted
to nothing, in the sight of Washington, or in the sight of Jefferson, or Hamilton,
and some of those other so-called founding fathers."10 For advocates of "black
power" and "black consciousness," the writing of black history became a crusade
to instill pride in black people, to erase any vestiges of a "slave mentality," and to
honor the role of black heroes in the black freedom struggle.
Not everyone welcomed the recognition of blacks as a "quasi-national"
group with a separate history and distinctive historical consciousness. In an essay
entitled "The Mythmakers of American History," delivered as the 1968 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, Stanford historian
Thomas A. Bailey argued that the authors of black history textbooks threatened to
push "significant white men" aside to make room for "much less significant black
men." Bailey saw myth-making at work in the "apotheosis" of Crispus Attucks as
a black Revolutionary War hero. Attucks may or may not have been black, Bailey
argued, and his deeds hardly qualified him as an American hero anyway. Black
pressure to rewrite the history of slavery represented another kind of distortion.
"The luckless African Americans while in slavery were essentially in jail; and we
certainly would not write the story of a nation in terms of its prison population,"
Bailey wrote. "Yet the pressure is on to overstress Negro initiative in organizing
The objections of Bailey and others were swept away by the rising tide of
social history, with its "bottom-up" perspective on American history. In the introduction to his 1977 book, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Lawrence Levine
argued that it was "time for historians to expand their own consciousness by
and long narrative oral poems. Levine did not refer to the stories African-Americans told themselves as "myths" or "legends" but rather as "folk thought," a term
that shifted the scholarly focus from accuracy to authenticity.12
constructed their various social identities, how they came to think of themselves
as "black" despite differences of color and social status; he simply filled a preexisting "black mind" with a "consciousness" presumably shared by all members of
the group. ("It can be repeated for many other groups in American history,"
Levine wrote of his method.) Nevertheless, Levine showed how the popular mind,
reality, or viewing the South as a solid and integrated social reality about which
there have been disparate ideas." For generations, historians had been searching
16Southern Cultures
about the South and its past during the interwar years; his emphasis on "high"
intellectual history allowed him to historicize certain ideas about the South that
previous scholars had sought to canonize or debunk.14
Recently Edward Ayers has extended this approach to more mundane and
and the rapid expansion of market capitalism, how they gave meaning and moral
significance to those changes and ordered their lives accordingly. While Ayers is
not generally regarded as a student of memory, his work shows how people living
in the South shaped their various group identities around perceptions of the
region's past and its relationship to the present and future. Ayers explores "the
idea of the American South" as expressed in "the promise of the New South," a
theme infused with multiple meanings and embedded in everything from music
to religion to politics. By allowing his subjects to define the promise of the New
South for themselves, Ayers illustrates the great diversity of thought and experience within the socially constructed boundaries of the region. His book is filled
with voices in open-ended dialogue: sharecroppers, shopkeepers, Democrats, Populists, preachers, teachers, miners, millworkers, fiction writers, blues singers, the
rich and the poor, the famous and the obscure. Ayers provides the context for
these texts, cutting and pasting them together in ways that challenge any simple
generalizations about the South. His book is a model for students of social memory, historicizing various conceptions of southern identity without stigmatizing or
sanitizing particular points of view.15
Which brings me back to my original question: Does social memory offer
a new perspective on southern history? The answer, I would argue, is yes and no.
Social memory resembles the historiography of Owsley and Du Bois in its
view of professional historians as influential figures whose authority is, for better
or for worse, contested and whose claims often rest on shaky empirical foundations. Social memory differs from their brand of polemical historiography in its
willingness to abandon the "objectivity myth" and treat perceptions of the past as
more or less persuasive. Students of social memory acknowledge the selectivity of
Social memory resembles the myth-and-symbol school of Taylor and Gaston in its concern with the mediation of historical knowledge through various
genres of popular culture, from newspaper editorials to pulp fiction. Social memory differs in its reluctance to postulate group identities or catalog the contents of
a collective "mind" or "consciousness." Social memory focuses on the construction of group boundaries, a process that reveals the multiplicity of meanings individuals attach to shared experiences and the intense struggles that take place
within groups over what to remember and what to forget. Where myth-and-symbol scholars treat some historical perceptions as myths and legends and others as
facts, students of social memory recognize such distinctions as part of an ongoing
struggle to legitimize certain perceptions and delegitimize others.
Social memory most closely resembles the approach to southern history
exemplified by O'Brien and Ayers; it builds on the work of previous scholars even
as it critiques and historicizes them. We should not claim too much for ourselves,
however, for humility is one of our hallmarks. Like Gaston and Taylor and Owsley
and Du Bois before us, we are just telling stories about people telling stories about
the South. Our stories should be testaments to the enduring significance of their
stories, not monuments to our own changing perceptions of the past.
Notes
1.This special issue of the Journal of American History was later published in a book;
see David P. Thelen, ed., Memory and American History (Indiana University Press, 1990).
2.Confino has emerged as a leading authority on "collective memory." For his definition and a brief history of the concept, see Aln Confino, "Collective Memory," in The
Encyclopedia ofSoaal History, ed. Peter N. Stearns (Garland, 1994). For an example of how he
has employed the concept in his study of German nationalism, see Confino, "The Nation as a
Local Metaphor: Heimat, National Memory, and the German Empire, 1871-1918," History and
Memory 5 (spring-summer 1993): 42-86. For an ethnographic approach to the study of
memory, see Richard Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (University of
Wisconsin Press, 1988).
3.Frank Lawrence Owsley, "The Irrepressible Conflict," in I'll Take My Stand: The South
and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners (Louisiana State University Press, 1983),
61-91; first published in 1930.
4.W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Propaganda of History," in Black Reconstruction in America,
1860-1880 (Atheneum, 1985), 711-729; first published in 1935.
18Southern Cultures
5.Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; reprint, Vintage Books, 1961).
6.William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (1961; reprint, Anchor Books, 1963).
7.C. Vann Woodward, "The Search for Southern Identity," in The Burden of Southern
History (Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 3-25; first published in 1960.
8.George B. Tindall, "Mythology: A New Frontier in Southern History," in The Idea of
the South, ed. Frank E. Vandiver (University of Chicago Press, 1964), 1-15.
9.Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (Alfred A.
Knopf, 1970).
son, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; reprint,
Verso, 1991).
14.Michael O'Brien, The Idea of the American South, 1920-1941 (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1979).
15.Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (Oxford
University Press, 1992).