Skip to main content

Southern Skeptic

March 2023
1min read

Woo-wee! I do believe Doctor Ferris and Professor Morris (“The Water in Which You Swim,” July/August) are running the best scam in the Lower Mississippi since the Duke and the Dauphin worked those parts. But at least they’re homeboys, and they give new luster to the term professional Southerner . And they give new hope to misplaced compatriots: If you don’t get treated right in New York City or London, England, you can always come home and start up a center for the study of Southern culture and rake in Yankee dollars, yen, francs, and deutschemarks from strangers shopping for the kind of wisdom the Doctor’s 101-year-old grandmomma used to give away free. Well, my grandmomma only lived to be 99, but she was more original and always used to tell me that blood was thinner than turpentine. Which means that a respectable magazine like American Heritage ought to post a warning when it opens its pages to hucksters—even if they’re family.

The Integrated South the Doctor and the Professor are peddling is as phony as the Cavaliers of Dixie or Henry Grady’s New South. Racial separatism is rampant in the real South, and there’s less social integration now than there was under legal segregation. The Doctor is indulging in willful ignorance of Southern history, if not folklore, when he brags about his daughter “going to a school with not only black children but children from Chinese and Lebanese backgrounds.” When I went to public school in Columbia, South Carolina, in the 1940s, I had no Chinese schoolmates, but there were some Japanese and enough Lebanese to staff sixteen oriental-rug bazaars—not to mention Greeks, Portuguese, and Italians. And I’ll guarantee you there was more racial integration back then at a Wynonie Harris dance in Myrtle Beach than at any function at the Doctor’s academic theme park. Wynonie isn’t even mentioned in that humongous Encyclopedia of Southern Culture the Doctor edited.

Another thing my little old grandmomma used to say: Everybody’s got to make a living.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "October 1994"

Authored by: The Editors

Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley

Authored by: The Editors

A Celebration of Baseball’s Legendary Fields

Authored by: The Editors

The Evolution of the Ballpark

Authored by: The Editors

Clash of Wings
World War II in the Air

Authored by: The Editors

American Flight Jackets, Airmen & Aircraft: A History of U.S. Flyers’ Jackets from World War I to Desert Storm

Authored by: The Editors

Shot in the Heart

Authored by: The Editors

Bettmann Portable Archive

Authored by: The Editors

Pictures of the Pain
Photography and the Assassination of President Kennedy

Authored by: The Editors

Music by Elliott Carter, Gunther Schuller, Milton Babbitt, and John Cage

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.