Though secession did not survive the Confederate War, peaceful secession is by no means inconceivable at some future date.—News and Courier
A featured part of the white South Carolina defense of the racial status quo is the allegation that the entire integration drive constitutes a gigantic conspiracy of jealous Yankees against Dixie. “South-baiting is currently a fad north of the Mason-Dixon line,” said the embittered News and Courier. Along with other pro-South spokesmen, the Charleston paper considers the integration crusade a continuation of the spirit of abolitionism and the “waving of the bloody shirt.” The South Carolina segregationist state of mind includes the assumption that a “cold war” exists between the “beleaguered” South and the rest of the nation. But the struggle of the 1950’8, as contrasted with that of the 1860’s, is basically one of ideas. Hence the success of Southern efforts depends upon effective presentation of the pro-segregation story to the nation. But alas, in this respect, segregationists face insurmountable handicaps. The South has to stand alone in the fight to save segregation and such related principles as “constitutional government, states rights, geographical spread of governmental powers, unlimited debate in the U. S. Senate, harmonious relations between the races, (and) separate and excellent school systems.” Because of the importance of these principles, the News and Courier would have its readers remember that “a little integration” is like “a little adultery.”[454] Southern opposition must be total.
In defending South Carolina against outside criticism, the press of the state, led by the News and Courier, has sought to point out the absolute superiority of the “Southern way of life.” Referring to the South in Jeffersonian terms the Morning News said: “An agrarian society helps encourage fundamental decency and proper thinking. People cannot be closely associated with nature and God’s bounty without absorbing some appreciation for the proper order of things and the love of God.”[455] The News and Courier decried the fact that “movies, popular novels, the Northern press, Northern colleges—and not a few teachers in Southern educational institutions” hammered at the theme that the South was “hopelessly out-of-date” and “ignorant and backward.” To combat this point of view, parents of college students were advised to “help their youngsters understand their traditions. Traditions have to be taught. They aren’t automatically implanted in the brains of 18 and 19 year-olds.”[456]
On another occasion the News and Courier, after “reluctantly” concluding that “the organized campaign of vilification of the Southern way-of-life and traditions has been partially inspired by malice,” declared, not inaccurately, that the Southern resistance was the result of “a unique and imperishable nationalism in the South.” This nationalism was not aggressive, it asserted. “It was cradled in the intense desire to be left alone.” It was rooted in the pride that Southerners had in their unique way of life.[457]
The South as the defender of traditional American values was the theme of a speech by Representative William Jennings Bryan Dorn. Employing terminology reminiscent of his famous namesake, he referred to his region as “the last frontier of Americanism.” It was the duty and challenge of the South to sell its “political, industrial and educational philosophy” to the rest of the country. “I’m proud I represent people who live in the Bible Belt,” said Dorn. “I had much rather represent the Bible Belt than some of the slums and confusion that exist in many of our larger cities.”[458]
Just as the South’s efforts to preserve segregation are warmly applauded, so are the North’s essays at integration roundly condemned. Here, again, the News and Courier is the leading though by no means the only spokesman. Comparing the segregated South with the integrated North, it stated:
Segregation in the South at least has prevented terrorism in cities. Crime exists, of course, but nothing like these reports from Northern cities. Undisciplined packs roam their streets. In the South we have no packs of savages. Though Negroes are more numerous, they are better behaved. Yes, and more CIVILIZED! They stay to themselves. They recognize and accept the limits set up for themselves and for white people.
Released from social restrictions of the segregation code, Negroes are running wild in the North. That is what the North would inflict on a far greater scale on the people of the South.[459]
On another occasion, the same paper indicated that its ideas on racial superiority extended not only to Negroes but to many whites as well: “Are these so-called Northern spokesmen actually Northern Americans? Are they from good old New England Yankee stock? Are they solid inland families, descended from pioneers who crossed the plains? Or are they first-generation mal-contents, full of alien notions? Are they recent immigrants from who knows where—Russia, perhaps?” Then in a not too subtle type of innuendo the News and Courier wondered “what kind of schism are they trying to drive through the Federal Union of States? Why, other than for Communist reasons, would they wish to split that union?”[460]
Many white South Carolinians accuse the North of hypocrisy. Governor Timmerman, for example, declared that “Northern propagandists are as loud, obnoxious and untruthful today as the Abolitionists were a century ago.” Integrationists, like the abolitionists, he asserted, are hypocrites. Editor Waring of the News and Courier stated that while the South had always been “open and above-board” in its treatment of Negroes, the North had been “sly and underhanded.”[461] Since the North had preserved segregation practically intact despite absence of legal sanction and non-discrimination laws, several spokesmen, including James F. Byrnes, urged the Gressette School Segregation Committee to go above the Mason-Dixon line to study Northern methods.