Louis Roney: Southerners and their thinking

The ObamaCare that is being foisted off on us at this time greeted the year with an infelicitous collection of taxes which nary a Republican voted for. Now we just took back the Senate so the “big taxer/spenders” may no longer upset our economic stability and make it impossible for future generations to survive in reality.

I, as a Conservative, am always concerned with preserving the good things of value we have created in the past, and not allowing thoughtless Liberals to discard them. I would always like to help my neighbor if he needs me and I can help him. But I don’t want to “coddle” him in the way that Democratic office-holders seem to do to those who vote them in.

Most honest citizens know that the things in our lives that have great value have come through generous inheritance or hard energetic work.

Large inheritances have a way of being dissipated, but what is earned by vision and sweat is not meant to be so lightly treated. Having only two political parties of note, I find myself a not-always-agreeing Republican.

Ones politics are expressive not only of personal prejudice, but often of stubborn stupidity. For a very long time “Southern Democrats” were the most Right-winged of all Americans and sported such worthy spokesmen as Georgia Sen. Walter F. George and Virginia’s Harry F. Byrd who were Democrats in name only.

As a person of long southern background, I see Conservatism as a natural philosophy of Southerners. This fact maybe grew out of America’s beginnings with Virginian’s George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe as early leaders. Even Chief Justice John Marshall came from Charles City County, Virginia, where “Westover, ” the Byrd family home, is still situated on the shore of the James River, as is “Shirley,” the home of the Lee family (Robert E. Lee’s mother). The Civil War delineated many of our national attitudes, when Robert E. Lee refused from President Lincoln to accept the leadership of the Union Army, to lead the South. Ulysses S. Grant, Lee’s former military inferior in Mexico, then led the Northern Army against Lee. In making his memorable decision, Lee’s expressed thought was: “I’m an American... but first I am a Virginian.” In retrospect I believe that most Southerners see the Civil War as a war that could have been avoided with more understanding and tact by President Lincoln. Brother fighting against brother made no sense to people who had founded this nation and shepherded it since the 1600s.

After all, Southerners were the primary founders of the nation that they now found themselves fighting against. I faintly remember my great grandfather, who as a youth, fought in the Battle of Atlanta. He thought later that the Civil War was a “national mistake.” The relatively swift post-war integration of the North and South seems to have reinforced his widely held opinion.

Tennessee-born poet John Crowe Ransom of “Reconstructed but Unregenerate” fame, was a member of the Kenyon College Ohio FIVE faculty-group. Ransom, (whose Pine Manor, daughter Helen, I took to Harvard dances) never forgot his southern birth and wrote: “The south is unique on this continent for having founded and defended a culture which was according to the European traditions of culture; and the European principles had better look to the South if they are to be perpetuated in this country.” The old unreconstructed Confederate is often patronizingly smiled at, with the wink of a mocking eye.

I remember earnest conversations with other young men in Atlanta after we had all emerged from service in World War II. We were all much concerned with what is worth preserving – and is realistically preservable, in what was long referred to as “the Old South.” We agreed that any sort of racial bias is unacceptable. We concurred that what we now have in the Old South is the result of black and white cooperation. The future lies open before us all – let’s make something gloriously united out of it.

Or, would our present White House resident seem to want us to be estranged?