If you’re interested in our country’s long history of polarization, look at the word “Southland.” Most Californians don’t know exactly how the LA area came to have the nickname often associated with the Old South. The story behind this strange juxtaposition provides the context for today’s crisis. Because it’s about America’s regional and political conflicts and how one opportunistic businessman profited from them.
The southeastern United States became popularly known as the “Southland” after the formation of the Confederacy in 1861. Before the first shots of the Civil War were fired on Fort Sumter, a poem titled “The South Fears No Enemy” was published in Richmond’s “Southern Literary Messenger.” From there flowed freely Confederate poetry praising “the South.”
Unionists responded with their own poetry. Augustine Dugannes, a New York state congressman, soldier, and poet, asked in an 1863 poem: “What was this Southland all about / But there’s one white grave of sin / So clean on the outside, so dirty on the inside?”
The Civil War ended in 1865, but the nickname and its association with the Confederacy remained. In 1878, the poem “Southland” read at a convention of the Mississippi Newspaper Association caused a firestorm. The author, Will Kernan, was a well-known extremist who wrote the extremely pessimistic “Songs of Hate.” Kernan edited a Southern states newspaper in Mississippi, but was originally from Ohio. That’s because America’s polarization, both then and now, transcended regional boundaries. In “Southland,” Mr. Kernan attacked the 14th and 15th Amendments, which gave black Americans citizenship and black men the right to vote, saying they should “control the blessing of voting by white people.”
Iowa’s Le Mars Sentinel responded with a parody of Kernan’s work. “Ho Southland / A land of sunny Southland /… A land of half-breeds, mongrels, bastards, mongrels, Hottentots, brigands and savages / A land of hard-boned traitors, Sentinel’s “Southland” has been widely reprinted and It made people angry. In 1880, Mississippi’s Meridian Mercury called for an end to all cooperation with the North. “Above all, love your sunny South Island…stop all the slimy hypocrisy of loving the whole country.” The New York Times reprinted Mercury’s disparaging article and condemned it.
As newspaper reporters across the country brandished “Southland” in rhetorical battles, new Los Angeles Daily Times editor Harrison Gray Otis began doing the same. California had its own North-South divide, and Otis resented Northern Californians’ derogatory perception of the “cattle county” south of the Tehachapi Mountains. He used the Times to fight back, commissioning poems like Edward Vincent’s “Southern California”: “Time, place, opportunity, advantage is thine/O fairest South.” did. Otis foiled San Francisco’s machinations in the same way that Lynyrd Skynyrd responded to Neil Young’s anti-Southern insults by “singing a song about the Southland” in Sweet Home Alabama. I ignored it.
Otis wasn’t the first to refer to L.A. as the Southland, but he was the most vocal and aggressive promoter of the term. In the boom-and-bust year of 1887, when the San Jose Mercury News encouraged central California to steer tourists away from the “crowded South,” Otis accused the “unhappy North” of “partial envy.” , a sunny southern island that “deplored their intrigues against this fair and just society.” ”
“Southern country” here refers to geography. But a month later, the Times accused “all of Northern California” of conspiring against the “Southland” and sending agents to “reconnoitre the land and send soft men north.” In this case, “Southland” represents a new region. As one Times reporter explains: California has a new South, and the whole world is beginning to know about it. ” California’s New South increasingly embraced its ties to the Old South.
On the other hand, this seemed appropriate since early LA was filled with Southern transplants who supported the Confederacy. In 1862, the San Francisco News declared, “In this day of peril to the Republic, we must never forget that Los Angeles County stands two to one for Dixie and Disunion.” But Otis was not a Southerner. He was a Union Army veteran from Ohio who had fought at Antietam.
When Otis promoted California’s Southland, he did not express any pride in being from the area. He was creating new territory. He spent his glory days winning in the old Southland region, and he repeated those victories on the West Coast. Borrowing from military terminology, “General Otis” called his Los Angeles mansion the “bivouac” and the Times staff the “phalanx” as he built and ruled the new Southland.
Unfortunately, Otis’ new reign reproduced the worst of the old one. It has grown into a new white oligarchy where the rich get richer and the working class suffers. Otis made a fortune through real estate speculation, but his rampant union-busting led to the 1910 Times bombing, which killed 21 people.
It will take another century for LA to build a better Southland. In California and in the United States, the work remains unfinished.
Laura Brody is a professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Her books include “Breaking Out: VMI and the Coming of Women.”
