In the event you’re interested by our nation’s lengthy historical past of polarization, have a look at the time period “Southland.” Most Californians are unaware of precisely how the better L.A. area wound up with a nickname extra generally related to the Previous South. The story behind this unusual juxtaposition supplies context for at the moment’s crises, as a result of it’s about America’s regional and political conflicts and the way one opportunistic businessman profited from them.
The southeastern United States turned extensively often called the “Southland” starting in 1861, when the Confederacy was fashioned. Earlier than the primary photographs of the Civil Conflict have been ever fired at Fort Sumter, a poem titled “The Southland Fears no Foeman” was revealed in Richmond’s “Southern Literary Messenger.” From there, Accomplice verse extolling “the Southland” flowed freely.
Unionists responded with their very own verses. Augustine Duganne, a New York legislator, soldier and poet, requested in an 1863 poem: “For what hath all this Southland been / However one white sepulchre of sin / So truthful with out — so foul inside?”
The Civil Conflict led to 1865, however the nickname and its affiliation with the Confederacy endured. In 1878, a “Southland” poem recited on the Mississippi Press Assn.’s conference prompted a firestorm. The writer, Will Kernan, was a widely known extremist who wrote the deeply misanthropic “Tune of Hate.” Though Kernan edited Mississippi’s Southern States newspaper, he was from Ohio, as a result of then, as now, America’s polarization transcended regional boundaries. In “Southland,” Kernan attacked the 14th and fifteenth amendments, which respectively gave citizenship rights to Black Individuals and voting rights to Black males: “Let the blessing of the poll by Caucasians be managed.”
Iowa’s Le Mars Sentinel pushed again with a parody of Kernan’s work: “Ho Southland / Sunny Southland /… Land of half-breeds, cross-breeds, bastards, hybrids, Hottentots, brigands, savages / Of raw-boned he-traitors and scrawny she-devils…” The Sentinel’s “Southland” was reprinted extensively, enraging Southerners. In 1880, Mississippi’s Meridian Mercury known as for an finish to all cooperation with the North: “Above all, love your individual sunny Southland…Eschew all slimy hypocrisy about loving the entire nation.” The New York Occasions reprinted, and condemned, the Mercury’s diatribe.
As newspapermen nationwide wielded “Southland” in rhetorical brawls, Harrison Grey Otis, editor of the brand new Los Angeles Every day Occasions, began doing the identical. California had its personal north/south rivalry, and Otis resented Northern Californians’ snooty notion of the “cow counties” south of the Tehachapi Mountains. He used the Occasions to struggle again, commissioning poems like Edward Vincent’s “Southern California”: “Time, place, alternative, benefit are thine/ O fairest south-land.” Otis rebuffed San Francisco’s sleights in the identical method Lynyrd Skynyrd responded in “Candy House Alabama” to Neil Younger’s anti-Southern insults: by “singin’ songs in regards to the Southland.”
Otis wasn’t the primary particular person to name L.A. the Southland, however he was the loudest, brandishing the phrase in his aggressive boosterism. Within the increase/bust yr of 1887, when the San Jose Mercury Information inspired central California to lure vacationers away from the “crowded South,” Otis accused “the sad North” of “sectional jealousy,” deploring its plots in opposition to “this truthful and sunny southland.”
Right here, “southland” referenced geography. However one month later the Occasions accused “all Northern California” of conspiring in opposition to “Southland,” sending brokers to “spy out the land and ship the tenderfoot northward.” On this case, “Southland” represented a brand new area. As one Occasions author defined: “We learn a lot in regards to the New South, referring to the Southern states of our Union. California has a New South, and the world at giant is starting to have a information of it.” More and more, California’s New South embraced a connection to the outdated one.
On one hand this appeared acceptable, since early L.A. was stuffed with Southern transplants who had supported the Confederacy. “Let it by no means be forgotten,” declared the San Francisco Bulletin in 1862, “that the county of Los Angeles, on this day of peril to the Republic, is 2 to 1 for Dixie and Disunion.” However Otis wasn’t Southern. He was a Union veteran from Ohio who’d fought at Antietam.
When Otis promoted California’s Southland, he wasn’t expressing the delight of a regional native — he was creating a brand new dominion. He had spent his glory days triumphing over the outdated Southland, and he replicated that triumph on the West Coast. “Common Otis” borrowed from army vocabulary to name his L.A. mansion “the Bivouac” and his Occasions workers “the phalanx” as he constructed, and lorded over, a brand new Southland.
Sadly, Otis’ new dominion replicated the worst of the outdated: It grew into one other white oligarchy the place the wealthy bought richer and the working class suffered. Otis made a fortune on real estate speculation whereas his rampant union-busting provoked the 1910 bombing of The Occasions through which 21 individuals died.
It could take one other century for L.A. to construct a greater Southland. That work, in California and America, stays unfinished.
Laura Brodie is a professor of English at Washington and Lee College in Virginia. Her books embody “Breaking Out: VMI and the Coming of Girls.”
