States of Mind : Chauvinism Still Part of Life in South

Whenever Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” comes on the jukebox at Gary Epps’ favorite bar here--a redneck hangout on the fringe of downtown--Epps has to fight back the urge to go over and stomp holes into the speakers.

Epps, a 29-year-old “Southerner by birth but Georgian by the grace of God,” cannot stand Alabama or anything about the state and its people.

“They’re the most screwed-up people on earth. They ain’t nothing like Georgians. Even of the best of them’s got something wrong with them. Face it, the best thing out of Alabama is I-20,” he said, referring to the interstate highway. “And that’s no joke with me.”

Nor is it with a lot of other Georgians. Scratch a Southerner and you’ll find a dedicated states’ rightist--dedicated to the right to look down on his neighbor states. Wherever you go in Dixie, from the redneck bars of Georgia to the blue-blood parlors of Virginia, state chauvinism is an enduring feature of the Southern way of life.

Southern Point of View

Yankees, from their perspective north of the Mason-Dixon Line, may regard the South as a solid, undifferentiated mass--one Georgia or Alabama or Mississippi. Most couldn’t tell a Georgia cracker from, say, a Florida cracker.

The sons and daughters of Dixie have a more practiced eye for distinctions. They know each state is in a class by itself, and that their own native state is on top. Georgians look down on Alabamians, Alabamians sneer at Mississippians and Mississippians heap scorn on Arkansans, while Virginians--the haughtiest Southerners of all--turn up their noses at the whole lot.

“To be a Virginian, either by birth, marriage, adoption or even on one’s mother’s side, is an introduction to any state in the Union, a passport to any foreign country and a benediction from Almighty God,” Virginians are fond of saying. They are quoting an encomium that can be found on plaques, banners, stationery, cocktail napkins and needlepoint pillows throughout the state.

Cultural Boundaries

What’s more, just as Southern Californians and Northern Californians tend to view each other as breeds apart, so there are sectional divisions within the South. Residents of the Florida Panhandle, where a sense of rural roots is still strong, complain bitterly of being treated like “red-headed stepchildren” by the increasingly urbanized and Yankeefied remainder of the state.

In Mississippi, descendants of the frugal, hard-scrabble farmers who settled the northeastern hill country of Mississippi still regard with puritanical disdain the flamboyant but cash-poor planter aristocracy of the state’s cotton-lush Delta region.

“They’re born with silver spoons in their mouths,” said Robert Anderson, a native of the Mississippi hills who runs a landscape management firm in Atlanta, “but the spoon was charged on credit, and it’s still not paid off. In the Delta, you have to be at least $150,000 in debt to be socially acceptable.”

And in north Georgia, sophisticated Atlantans consider their cousins below the “gnat line” to be rubes. The gnat line is an imaginary boundary between the uplands of the north and the lowlands and coastal region in the south, where the gnats are ferocious in summer.

“It’s hard to be suave when you’re swatting at gnats all the time,” said Atlanta physician Barry M. Henderson.

History plays an important role in the pecking order of state chauvinism in the South. Since Colonial times, North Carolina has been called a “vale of humility between two mountains of conceit,” an allusion to Virginia and South Carolina, its prideful neighbors to the north and south.

Virginia’s sense of importance rests on its fame as the home of the first permanent English settlement in America, as the birthplace of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Marshall and Robert E. Lee, and for Richmond, one-time capital of the Confederacy.

Tale of Two Carolinas

South Carolina also boasts of a rich past. It played a vital role in the winning of American independence. The Charleston aristocracy set the standard for elegance in the “Old Plantation” South, and fiery South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun was an important intellectual progenitor of the Confederate cause.

In such illustrious company, North Carolina long found it hard to hold its head high. It had had no large planter class, no city even remotely resembling Richmond or Charleston in their heyday. North Carolina remained in the Union until Abraham Lincoln issued his call for troops and Virginia’s and South Carolina’s secessions made it a “lonely island of loyalty” between them.

In his classic 1949 study, “Southern Politics,” the eminent Southern political scientist V. O. Key said of North Carolina: “The arrogant glare of the gentry in neighboring Virginia and South Carolina gave it a sense of inferiority, or at least so say some North Carolinians.”

Recently, however, shifting economic, political and social forces since the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s and the onset of the Sun Belt industrial boom have brought a dramatic reversal of positions.

Virginia Left Behind

Once-lowly North Carolina has emerged from relative obscurity to surpass both Virginia and South Carolina in population, industrial output and percentage of the work force employed in manufacturing. It is now the 10th largest state in the nation and surpasses both Virginia and South Carolina in its percentage of high school graduates.

All this has given North Carolinians a new perspective on their once unbearably snooty neighbors.

“We still have a deep respect for Virginians, because of their history and their sense of dignity,” said Claibourne Darden Jr., who now lives in Atlanta and is one of the South’s most prominent pollsters and political analysts. But, he added with thinly veiled sarcasm: “We do indeed wonder why Virginians are trailing everybody else in the South in going forward.”

As for the neighbors in South Carolina: “What can you say about a state that still lets 14-year-olds drive tractors on main highways?” Fletcher Smith, restaurant manager at the Sheraton Hotel in Greensboro, N.C., wondered with a contemptuous sneer.

(Actually, 14-year-olds are permitted by law to drive tractors on major roads in Smith’s own state as well, but facts have never gotten into the way of state pride in the South.)

The image of Tennessee, long looked on as a backward, hillbilly state, has similarly benefited as a result of its leadership position in the Sun Belt boom.

On the other hand, some states have been unable to shake off a poor image. Mississippi, for example, is still widely regarded as the pariah of Dixie.

Although it can point to advancements in economic, political and social life, Mississippi almost invariably ranks last among the Southern states in standard measures of well-being such as per capita income, school expenditures per pupil, percentage of high school graduates and infant mortality rate.

“I think Mississippi’s a jewel, but I guess no matter how bad any other Southern state may feel, it thinks it can still look over here and say, ‘Thank God for Mississippi,’ ” said V. A. Patterson, curator of the historic Manship House in Jackson, the state capital.

Mississippi’s neighbor to the east, Alabama, likewise still gets little respect in the South, partly because of the memory of the bloody confrontations that took place there during the desegregation movement, and because of the long shadow cast by former Gov. George C. Wallace, the one-time segregationist who dominated Alabama politics for almost a quarter-century until his retirement this year. Alabama also usually joins Mississippi in the cellar in terms of personal income, education spending and achievement levels, unemployment and infant mortality rates.

“You go anywhere--not just in the South--and say you’re from Alabama and people say, ‘Oh, God, no!’ ” lamented Delores Pickett, one-time aide to Wallace who now runs a consulting firm in the capital, Montgomery. “I had to defend Alabama almost every day when I lived in other states.”

In his inaugural speech in January, Wallace’s successor, Republican Guy Hunt, vowed to turn Alabama’s image around so that “in the future, not only will we Alabamians be able to say we’re proud to be from Alabama, but people everywhere, when they meet an Alabamian, will say: ‘You must be proud to be from Alabama.’ ”

Famous Native Sons

That may prove to be a tall order, but Alabama does have much to be proud of. Its native sons have included W. C. Handy, “father of the blues,” and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. Tuskegee Institute was once the nation’s premier black institution of higher education. The state’s Confederate credentials are impeccable--Montgomery was the Confederate capital before the seat of government was moved to Richmond, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis was sworn in on the steps of the white-domed Alabama Statehouse.

Nevertheless, perhaps even more than Mississippi, Alabama seems to be to the South what New Jersey is to the whole United States: the butt of a never-ending stream of tacky jokes.

Example: “Did you hear about the tornado that swept through Alabama? It left $250,000 worth of improvements.”

Or this one, overheard from a merchant on the “Redneck Riviera” along the Florida Panhandle coast: “The trouble with the tourists from Alabama is they come down with one dollar and one T-shirt and don’t change either one while they’re here.”

Alabamians, of course, do not take all this lying down. Of Florida, for example, a Birmingham native said: “Anymore, it looks like a piece of New York that floated down the Atlantic Coast and attached itself to South Georgia.”

Of Georgia, Wayne Greenhaw, editor of Alabama Monthly Magazine in Montgomery, said: “I’d rather live in the Alabama boondocks than any city in Georgia, including and especially Atlanta.”

Atlanta, in fact, receives a lot of flak from Southerners all over Dixie who deplore the loss of what they considered the city’s Old South flavor as it has become a booming New South metropolis.

“Atlanta’s like an old belle that’s been waltzed around the floor once too often,” sniffed a Richmond patrician. A Nashville booster added: “Atlanta is growing up like a whore, while Nashville is growing up like a lady.”

Whether state and sectional chauvinism as a feature of Southern life is fading as Dixie becomes more homogenized is debatable.

Virginia Naillings, a Tennessee native who works on the presidential campaign staff of Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), said that chauvinism is waning--although she recently discovered, to her surprise, that she harbored a classical Tennessee attitude toward Arkansas, Tennessee’s neighbor to the west, across the Mississippi River.

Territorial Divisions

In a conversation with the Atlanta-based Southern correspondent for a major West Coast newspaper, he mentioned that his territory did not include all the states of the Old Confederacy.

“We have a separate bureau in Miami to handle Florida, and the Houston bureau covers Louisiana and Arkansas,” he told her.

“Oh, Arkansas doesn’t count as Southern anyway,” she responded. “It’s on the other side of the river.”

William Ferris, director of the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, said that state chauvinism will always exist in the South, regardless of other changes in the region.

“It’s the nature of Southern culture to establish myths as a way of identifying oneself,” he said. “And these myths, whether we agree that they’re true or not, will always be a part of our lives. In the South, as William Faulkner said so tellingly, the past is never dead--in fact, it’s not even past.”