Ayers: Extinct Volcanoes -- Liberalism in the South
A excerpt from a speech by former Anniston Star publisher H. Brandt Ayers
The American South Symposium, University, MS
Nov. 19, 2004

Throughout Southern history, the latent progressive instinct has flared into light, bright eruptions, only to cool -- almost at the very moment of epiphany. The Lamar Society was one of several eruptions which lit up the sky for a moment, and then died. Their cold bodies are strewn through our history -- extinct volcanoes. What has it been like to live through such a frustrating history?

To be liberal-minded in the Deep South is a lonely occupation. It is to be pulled this way and that by complex, contradictory feelings about your own people -- about yourself. It is to feel inescapably, even willfully one with a people who disappoint and hurt you, who make you laugh and bite your lip in frustration, whose charm and generosity live side by side with meanness and bigotry, who cling to the paraphernalia of the Lost Cause even as it holds them down., They are resigned to -- almost in love with -- defeat.

We have wanted more for our people than they have wanted for themselves. In the Deep South, our people seem satisfied with a job, self-respect, supper with the family, church on Wednesday and twice on Sunday. Truth be known, their granddaddies were born into a third-world nation within a nation, and worked for less than a dollar a day. They have been stifled by lousy schools, gulled by demagogic politicians, and scored for their backward ways by elites, North and South. Life has dug a cultural canyon between them and those of us who escaped the once-and-future Confederacy through luck or education and travel.

Certain Afrikaners and Russians know what it is like to be held by the invisible, unbreakable bonds of nativity to a society they love and despair of, to experience a brief epiphany of reform - the joyous lightness of release from scorn and separation - and then feel the old, familiar weight of depression return as bright promise dulled into the reality that the quest for a truly good society would go on beyond your own lifetime, would go on forever, maybe never be found.

Origins of "our" New South impulse, which focused the mind of the South for a season, actually date back to a series of conversations as early as 1966 between Tom Naylor and Jim Leutze. They worried that frustrated young Southerners were leaving the South, dismayed by the intransigence of most of the region's political leaders. Conversation was fleshed in an action plan after an airport breakfast meeting in Memphis between Tom and Mike Cody. They, which Hodding Carter and Willie Morris, began assembling a network of young progressives.

None of us in that network was so prescient as to believe we were defining a whole new civilization. Mainly, as Mike and Tom envisioned the fetal organization, we would come together "to get ideas and, in a sense, comfort from each other." We had all come of age in a conservative culture that was in love with the past. Thus, the Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar Society, an antique name to disguise a liberal purpose. The name was suggested by former Congressman Frank Smith, a wounded veteran of Mississippi political wars. He knew everybody, and supplied Tom with many of the names in the initial list, including mine. Lamar had the right transformational credentials: a firebrand secessionist before the Civil War who was celebrated by John Kennedy in "Profiles in Courage" because in a famous Senate speech he appealed for reason and reconciliation, "My countrymen, now one another and you will love one another."

Our first gathering was at a UNC conference center, Quail Roost. We came with a sense of anticipation, discovery and validation much as expatriates working in Saudi Arabia or Yemen might feel on learning there were other Americans who shared similar experiences and beliefs. We left Quail Roost with an Agincourt feeling: "We happy few; we band of brothers." Mike was our leader, and the next stop was an inaugural symposium in his hometown, Memphis. It had an inauspicious start. The keynote speaker, chosen to symbolize the Society's appeal to moderate Republicans, was Arkansas Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller. His slow, unsteady gait as he approached the podium signaled an unhappy fact. The governor was drunk. But it was a lively gathering, energetic and intelligent, with a brilliant benediction from Dick Goodwin, President Johnson's speechwriter.

For me, the high point of our brief progressive bubble in the 70s was Atlanta in the spring of 1971. Mike had orchestrated his own overthrow, and I was to chair the Atlanta symposium and follow him as president. My job was to get the banquet speaker, then democratic presidential front-runner, Sen. Ed Muskie, who accepted. I don't remember how we got four Southern governors, but there they were - on a panel chaired by former North Carolina Gov. Terry Sanford, then president of Duke. They were the ABC+W New South governors, Class of 1970: Askew of Florida, Bumpers of Arkansas, Carter of Georgia and West of South Carolina. When they spoke in a ballroom crowded with New South acolytes, it was an epiphany! Never before had a Southern audience seen so many Southern governors on the same stage - all facing forward, speaking not to the retarding mythologies of the past, but to the living present, and the future that was to be.

Atlanta gave us a tailwind, and we took off from there. We joined as junior partners with Terry and Duke in creating the Southern Growth Policies Board, which Terry had articulated in his keynote speech in Atlanta. We put our out book, "You Can't Eat Magnolias," had meetings and symposia in Birmingham, Little Rock, Dallas, Jackson and back in Atlanta again. Along the way, we caught the attention of many talented young Southerners, seeded them with progressive ideas, and then we slowly began to go away.

Our decline and eventual disappearance has multiple causes. I wasn't an articulate and effective leader, partly because we didn't brand the Society with a clear, compelling definition. We were determined not to be the closed society into which we were born. But we were so open, we seemed to stand for nothing. We did not clearly say what we clearly were: a leadership organization that appealed to progressive, realistic men and women of the South. A second cause of decline was the Southern Growth Policies Board which, in effect, devoured one of its parents. And finally, many of our talented leaders were absorbed into the effort of one of our members to be President of the United States.

Our leave-taking was no stellar explosion, a Southern supernova. We disappeared into the moist, fragrant Southern night as imperceptibly as the passing of the last fireflies of summer.

Our bones fell among those left by earlier liberal causes that have littered the Southern landscape since the 1930s…

The flame in me and the rest of the board flickered; our interest riveted by the rising success of one of our members in his campaign for President of the United States. A Southern President? We found it hard then to imagine such a thing, but we hoped, held our breath and watched with fascination. The Lamar Society membership roll was Jimmy Carter's first fund-raising list, and a good many of our star members were absorbed into his administration. With a Southerner in the White House, we shrugged, "Well, we won the war," and went home. Another progressive voice in the South fell silent.

At the end of the day, a progressive voice in the South was muted because liberals did not burn the fuel that keeps the right-wing taught, suspicious, alert and strong - fear and hatred.

New progressive voices are being heard again: the Center here and in Chapel Hill, and there is a brand new star modeled after the Lamar Society rising out of South Carolina, a Center for a Better South. Its founder is here, Andy Brack, president of a Charleston communications strategy firm. He is off to a promising start, pulling together a key group of supporters, and securing funding for a major regional conference in February. If the Center can keep focused on issues behind which broad coalitions can be formed - safer neighborhoods, a growing middle class, schools for both high-achievers and at-risk students, a cleaner environment - and if liberals can maintain discipline, keeping internal bickering to a minimum, this new movement may survive its adolescence.

Andy deserves our financial and moral support, for he makes us dream our old dream again - of a South that draws pride from cities built for people not just profit, from rural areas that remind us man is not superior to nature, from wealth that is more widely distributed, a South whose painful, hard history has taught its heart wisdom.

That has been our dream, Andy. We hope it is your future.