The Southern Hospitality Myth: Ethics, Politics, Race, and American Memory

The Southern

Hospitality Myth

SERIES EDITORS

Jon Smith, Simon Fraser University

Riché Richardson, Cornell University

ADVISORY BOARD

Houston A. Baker Jr., Vanderbilt University

Leigh Anne Duck, The University of Mississippi

Jennifer Greeson, The University of Virginia

Trudier Harris, The University of Alabama

John T. Matthews, Boston University

Tara McPherson, The University of Southern California

Claudia Milian, Duke University

The Southern

Hospitality Myth

ETHICS, POLITICS,

RACE, AND AMERICAN MEMORY

Anthony Szczesiul

This publication is made possible in part through a grant from the Bradley Hale Fund for Southern Studies.

© 2017 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Szczesiul, Anthony, author.

Title: The Southern hospitality myth : ethics, politics, race, and American memory / Anthony Szczesiul.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, 2017. | Series: The new Southern studies series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016049005| ISBN 9780820332765 (hard bound : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9780820350738 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Southern States—Social life and customs—1775–1865. | Hospitality—Southern States—History. | Hospitality—Moral and ethical aspects—Southern States—History. | Southern States—Moral conditions. | Racism—Southern States—History. | Southern States—Public opinion—History. | Regionalism—United States—History. | Memory—Political aspects—United States—History. | Memory—Moral and ethical aspects—United States—History. | Public opinion—United States—History.

Classification: LCC F213 .S96 2017 | DDC 305.800975—DC23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049005

For Stacy

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has taken far too long to complete, and given the length of time devoted to the research and writing process (well over a decade), I have incurred a very long list of debts. The origins of this project lie in some lively class discussions that took place in one of my southern literature courses over a decade ago, so my first debt of gratitude goes to my past and present students at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who not only inspired this project, but who also inspire me every day with their earnest curiosity and general goodwill. I feel lucky to go to my job every day. As I initially explored this subject before the archival research began, Michael Pierson of the UMass Lowell History Department was an important resource of information. At this early stage, I also benefitted from several long, meandering conversations about the project with my colleagues Julie Nash and Todd Avery and my good friends Gavin Sturges and Jake Bridge. Their thoughtful and generous interactions gave me the confidence to move forward and proved invaluable over the years of my research and writing. Early research was conducted at the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, and my friends Keen and Nancy Butterworth put me up for a good part of a summer in their home in Columbia.

This project simply would not have been possible had I not lived in close proximity to one of America’s great archives: the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. What originally began as a more traditional literary studies project evolved into this current form largely through my time spent at the AAS, and through the many forms of collegial assistance I received there. In addition to many (generally happy) days spent in the reading room at AAS, I took advantage of two of their Summer Seminars in the History of the Book (first with Phil Gura and later with Lloyd Pratt and Jeannine DeLombard), and I also received a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship in the summer of 2005. Each of these experiences provided amazing opportunities for collegial interaction with fellows, seminar participants, and the incredible librarians and support staff at AAS. I would list every seminar participant and fellow and librarian if I could, but the list would be too long, and I would surely miss somebody. Special mention does go, however, to Camille Dungy and Kathryn Koo, both of whom were on concurrent fellowships with me in the summer of 2005. Our daily conversations over lunch certainly influenced the direction this project took in the years that followed.

The Society for the Study of Southern Literature has provided one of the main forums through which I have received feedback and developed my thinking on this subject over the years, particularly at the society’s biennial conferences. I am grateful for the collegial community that SSSL provides, and the responses I received at the conferences always rejuvenated my interest in this project when it was flagging or even failing. Special thanks to Cole Hutchinson, Michael Bibler, Leigh Anne Duck, Jennifer Greeson, Julia Eichelberger, Daniel Cross Turner, Tom Haddox, Michael Kreyling, Jack Matthews, and Lisa Hinrichsen, all of whom offered meaningful encouragement or particularly thoughtful responses to my work at key moments. Thanks also to Kathleen Diffley, who provided significant feedback on a section of chapter 5 that first appeared in her edited essay collection, Witness to Reconstruction: Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873–1894 (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). Portions of chapter 1 and chapter 6 were first published in an earlier form in a special issue of the European Journal of American Culture in 2007. Thanks to the press and to the journal for permission to reprint this earlier work. Sincere thanks also go to the many artists who provided permission to include their works in my study: Pierre Bellocq, Fran DiGiacomo, Karen Dupre, Larry Dyke, Britt Ehringer, Kevin Liang, and Frank Tarpley.

The University of Georgia Press has been both encouraging and patient in its support of this project. Thanks to Nancy Grayson for expressing an early interest in my work and to Walter Biggins for seeing the manuscript across the finish line. Thanks also to the series editors, Jon Smith and Riché Richardson, for having the faith that this would be a worthwhile addition to the series, and to Jon and Scott Romine, who served as the (formerly) anonymous reviewers of the manuscript. Their meticulous and thoughtful feedback truly helped me to find my way when I was still quite lost. Thanks also to John Joerschke and Thomas Roche of the press, who served as project editors, and to Barbara Wojhoski, who copyedited the manuscript.

I have received many forms of support at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, including a semester sabbatical and research and travel funding to support my work. Deborah Friedman and Rose Paton of University Libraries have always been especially helpful to me during this long process. As a faculty member and department chair, I have been fortunate to work under two outstanding deans: the late Nina Coppens and Luis Falcón. Luis has been especially supportive and encouraging as I have neared the completion of this project. This book was especially difficult to complete while I have been serving as the English department chair, and I am forever thankful to my colleague and friend Bridget Marshall, who, with the support of Luis, agreed to step in as interim chair for a semester so that I could complete the manuscript (what Bridget got out of this in exchange was the prescient knowledge that she will never again agree to be chair). Many thanks also to Jacky Ledoux, whose remarkable efficiency and contagious laugh make my work as chair more manageable. I am very lucky to work in a vibrant and collegial department, and I appreciate the way that so many of my colleagues have provided encouragement as I have worked to complete this book. Special thanks go to Mike Millner, who generously read and discussed draft chapters with me and who always had an uncanny knack for asking just the right question to keep me moving forward, and to Sue Kim, who carefully read the manuscript prior to my initial submission to the press. Many thanks also to my dear friends and colleagues Julie Nash and Paula Haines, who have always been invaluable sources of emotional support along the way.

Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank my family for their constant faith that this would get done. I am blessed with parents who have provided nothing but constant love and support throughout my life, and brothers and sisters who have always offered their encouragement. My sister Karen deserves special mention for providing much-needed moral support and for serving as a trusted reader at various stages of the writing process. My greatest debt of all is owed to Stacy, who, unlike me, never doubted that this would be completed, and to our wonderful daughters, Adelaide, Zoe, and Emma, who always manage to put things in proper perspective for me. I am lucky to go home to them every day (but even more so now that this is done).

The Southern

Hospitality Myth

INTRODUCTION

What Can One Mean by

Southern Hospitality?

The southerner is indeed hospitable to this day, loving nothing more than to entertain family and friends with the best food and drink he can afford. The automobile and the telephone make visiting far simpler than in the early times; normally only guests who have traveled great distances stay overnight, and the length of such visits is limited by the construction of the modern home. But if the circumstances of southern hospitality have changed, the spirit remains the same.

— Encyclopedia of Southern Culture,

Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, eds.

We do not yet know what hospitality is.

—Jacques Derrida, Hostipitality

How important is southern hospitality to your definition of today’s South? So asked question 82 of the spring 1995 edition of the Southern Focus Poll conducted by John Shelton Reed and the Howard W. Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Reed and the Odum Institute ran the Southern Focus Poll from 1992 to 2001, interviewing by phone thousands of southerners and nonsoutherners, seeking their responses on a wide range of political, economic, social, and cultural issues, as well as their sense of regional identity and cultural characteristics. Question 82 was one of a series of eight questions from the spring 1995 poll that were described as being about the South in general, and the overall response to it was unique both for the high degree of importance respondents placed on southern hospitality and for the remarkable similarity in the responses from southerners and nonsoutherners. Of the 917 southerners polled, 73.7 percent rated southern hospitality very important to their definition of today’s South, and another 17.8 percent rated it somewhat important. Of the 506 nonsoutherners polled, 67.9 percent rated it very important, and 21.6 percent rated it somewhat important. Overall, 91.5 percent of southerners and 89.5 percent of nonsoutherners placed some degree of importance on southern hospitality in their definition of today’s South. But what, exactly, does this poll reveal about the definition of the South, about the behavior of southerners, about southern culture? Does it confirm that hospitality is a traditional and integral element of southern cultural heritage, or does it simply tell us that the phrase southern hospitality has a high rate of recognition among Americans, whether they are southern or not? Hospitality has indeed been associated with the South for well over two centuries, but how did we get from the origins of southern hospitality—what historically were a limited set of antebellum planters’ social practices in a slave economy—to what was, at the close of the twentieth century, an apparently surveyable regional trait? Moreover, how and why have we taken something as particular as the social habit of hospitality—which is exercised among individuals and inevitably must be infinitely varied in its particular practices—and so generalized it as to assign it to an entire region of the country? Why have we chosen to remember and valorize this particular aspect of the South? And what of the fundamental ethical questions that underlie the concept of hospitality—how do these figure into our estimations of hospitality as a cultural trait of the American South, particularly in light of the South’s historical legacy of slavery and segregation? These are some of the questions that initially motivated this study, and I set out to answer them in the chapters that follow.

Historians have offered a variety of explanations of the origins and cultural practices of hospitality in the antebellum South. Economic historians have at times portrayed southern hospitality as evidence of conspicuous consumption and competition among wealthy planters. Cultural historians have treated it peripherally as symptomatic of the southern code of honor and have pointed to circumstances such as the large distances between plantations, the dearth of public inns, and the relative lack of public welfare, all of which resulted in more pressure on the plantation home. Though historians differ on the origins and early practices of hospitality in the antebellum South, they generally agree that the mythic dimensions of southern hospitality eventually outran its practices. In The Transformation of Virginia, for example, Rhys Isaac goes so far as to claim that the social reality on which the myth was based went out of fashion as early as 1800.¹ Still, the myth of southern hospitality persisted even as social and political conditions underwent the drastic transformations of slavery, sectionalism, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the long struggle for civil rights. Indeed, this myth of southern hospitality has been an essential, foundational narrative within the larger national project of southern exceptionalism—the persistent belief that the South is a distinct, unique, and separate culture within the larger United States. This notion of an exceptional South has been a basic belief in American culture for well over two centuries, and it has served as the very assumption that motivated the scholarly fields of southern literary, historical, and cultural studies from their inceptions through most of the twentieth century.

Since roughly the turn of the twenty-first century, however, scholars have increasingly questioned or abandoned the assumption of southern exceptionalism, seeing it as a historically constructed concept rather than a natural essence. Instead of trying to understand and define what the South and southern culture supposedly are, they have asked questions such as What are the motivations behind this constructed belief in the exceptional South? How was this idea of the South created, and how has it evolved and been deployed over time? What sorts of ideological functionings or cultural work has it performed, both within the region and the nation? And with what consequences? For example, in the field of literary studies Michael Kreyling has deftly exposed the conservative politics that motivated the modern invention of the southern literary canon and its corresponding discipline of southern literary studies. Considering the South in broader national contexts, Tara McPherson, Leigh Anne Duck, and Jennifer Greeson have all demonstrated ways in which the concept of the South has been central to the national imaginary, and they have argued that southern exceptionalism and American exceptionalism have been mutually constituted since the nation’s founding. McPherson, Duck, and Greeson have respectively described the South as a fiction, the nation’s region, and an internal other, a site for repressed fears as well as for projective fantasies within the national imaginary. Alternatively, historian Grace Elizabeth Hale has shown how the South’s emerging cultural logic of segregation became the model for the simultaneous construction of a national white identity in the modern consumer marketplace. Recent essay collections have taken interdisciplinary approaches to the imagined South and its very real consequences and have attempted to explode this myth of southern exceptionalism altogether. In his introduction to Creating and Consuming the American South, for example, Martyn Bone explains that the collection’s goal is to reorient our attention to the ways in which ideas and stories about ‘the South’ and ‘southerners’ have social and material effects that register on various local, regional, national, and transnational scales. A few years earlier, the title of another essay collection, The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, clearly announced an intention to tackle head-on the belief in southern exceptionalism; editors Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino bluntly explain in their introduction that the notion of the exceptional South has served as a myth, one that has persistently distorted our understanding of American history. The essays in this groundbreaking volume repeatedly show that these distortions have been greatest and most consequential in how we view America’s complex racial history. Regarding that history, Lassiter and Crespino explain that their goal in dismantling southern exceptionalism is not to absolve the South but to implicate the nation. They rightly conclude that discarding the framework of southern exceptionalism is a necessary step in overcoming the mythology of American exceptionalism, transforming the American Dilemma [of racial injustice] into a truly national ordeal, and traversing regional boundaries to rewrite the American past on its own terms and in full historical perspective.² In this same spirit I set out in this study to deconstruct what is perhaps the most persistent and ubiquitous myth of southern exceptionalism (southern hospitality), to show how this discursive formation of southern hospitality first emerged and how it has historically functioned within our national imaginary, and to push the topic of national cultural memory regarding the American South beyond the more transitory realm of politics and toward an abiding realm of ethical consideration.

While historians have provided various explanations of the antebellum practices that gave rise to the southern hospitality myth, no one has yet addressed the persistent appeal and evolving meanings of the myth itself. Instead, for the past two centuries southern hospitality more often than not has been unquestioningly accepted as an essential and natural cultural attribute of the South. The first epigraph, drawn from the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, provides a concise example of this tendency as well as some of the problems that go along with it. While the editors of the Encyclopedia—a serious academic work published by the University of North Carolina Press—rightly include the discussion of southern hospitality in a section of the Encyclopedia devoted to the Mythic South, the tone of the entry suggests more interest in justifying the reality of southern hospitality than in exploring or explaining its status as a cultural myth. Indeed, the passage reflects the way that many academics devoted to the study of the South have been invested in maintaining and justifying a sense of regional distinctiveness and exceptionalism. The author of the entry emphasizes the historical origins and intensely real quality of southern hospitality, and he concludes that if the circumstances of southern hospitality have changed from the antebellum period to the present, the spirit remains the same.³ He creates a narrative of continuous development, rhetorically linking the antebellum South with the contemporary South, the historical origins of southern hospitality with the contemporary spirit of southern hospitality. Southern hospitality becomes a common denominator of both the past and the present, an unchanging cultural attribute that has somehow survived the social, political, economic, and cultural upheavals that have occurred in the South over the past two centuries.

This way of portraying southern culture as an unchanging essence is precisely the sort of rhetorical turn that interests Immanuel Wallerstein in his essay What Can One Mean by Southern Culture? Wallerstein, a sociologist and leading figure of World Systems Theory, makes an important and revealing disclaimer early in the essay, noting that he is concerned not . . . with what this culture [of the South] is supposed to be, but [with] whether and in what sense it is meaningful to suggest that it exists. Wallerstein is particularly interested in the ways in which scholars who have written about the South have used the concept of culture in their work; the most prevalent habit is to see (southern) culture as a description of a set of traits, culture as ‘tradition.’ By culture in this sense is meant some summum of institutions and ideas/values that is thought to be long-existing and highly-resistant to change. Other prominent tendencies include seeing southern culture as a binary counterpoint to the North or as a virtue to be defended against threats such as change and modernization. After considering several examples from cultural historians whose approaches illustrate these various tendencies, Wallerstein concludes that for all these writers, culture . . . turns out to be less an analytic concept or analytic construct than a rhetorical flag around which one rallies, a weapon in the larger political battles.⁴ As for the tendency to see the South and its culture as solid or unchanging, Wallerstein rightly reminds us of the diversity, constant change, and fluidity of historical reality, particularly when we shift our attention to smaller, more local scales of affiliation:

As soon as we allot cultures to entities within entities, there is no logical end. The West has a culture, the United States has a culture, the South has a culture, Georgia has a culture, and I suppose Atlanta has a culture. In addition, blacks and whites in Georgia/the South/the United States have distinct cultures. And so on. Why not each community, each kin network, each household? And why not each generation of each group? The answer is there is no reason why not, and people do speak of culture at these levels. Can we then assume each of these cultures represents some kind of enduring set of behaviors and values that is resistant to change? We can if we want to, but where does that get us?

As soon as we look closely at the smaller-scale entities, we become very conscious of how constantly changing are the sets of practices and values of small groups—within an individual’s lifetime, not to speak of over longer periods. . . . Furthermore, we know that even if group values remain constant over any period of time, we can never assume that all individuals in that group either affirm those values or engage in behavior consonant with them. At most, the statement of group values is a statistical mean of specific ways of behaving and professed beliefs with a presumable low standard deviation. As to this presumption, we have in practice virtually zero hard evidence. Perhaps the standard deviation varies from group to group, from time to time. Perhaps? All too probably.⁵

Given this diversity of human experience at the local level, Wallerstein asserts that it is probably far more defensible intellectually to assume that variability is the norm and that continuities are exceptional.⁶ If we consider all the change that occurs on this micro-level as Wallerstein describes it, how is it possible to speak of the constancy of the South as a culture? More particularly for this study, how is it possible to think of hospitality as a cultural trait of the entire South, if we consider the diversity of these individual practices, habits, and conceptions that occur at any given moment, let alone over time? According to Wallerstein,

It has been possible because groups, in seeking to pursue their interests, will be able to do so insofar as they can persuade their members to act in some unified fashion. And a crucial mode of persuading these individuals, who in fact hold multiple group memberships (and hence, . . . are individuals of divergent interests), is to persuade these individuals that the desired behavior is normal, traditional, hallowed by time and therefore expected in the present. The recreation of an ever-varying tradition requires the spread of the belief that no change has in fact occurred.⁷

It should be noted that Wallerstein’s description of the power of persuasion involved in creating group identities begins a shift away from a simple consideration of the social practices that supposedly constitute group identities and toward the various discursive methods—narratives, images, rhetorics, fictions—used to persuade individuals that they are participating in such a supposedly unchanging tradition. The belief that no change has in fact occurred is the implicit assumption of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture’s entry on southern hospitality and of most utterances of the phrase southern hospitality. To speak of southern hospitality is always to gesture to the past, to link the present to the past in an ongoing, seemingly unchanging tradition. In this way the discourse of southern hospitality forms a pervasive habit of cultural memory and serves as part of a broader persuasive appeal that the South exists as a distinct region and meaningful cultural category.⁸

Like Wallerstein in What Can One Mean by Southern Culture? I am not especially concerned in this study with what southern hospitality is supposed to be; rather my interest is whether and in what sense it is meaningful to suggest that it exists. In other words, I am interested not in defining the practices that supposedly constitute southern hospitality but rather in how southern hospitality has functioned in the national imaginary, both as a form of persuasion and as a meaning-making story that has been told about the South for more than two centuries.⁹ More specifically, I approach southern hospitality as a discourse, a system of representations and narratives through which southerners and nonsoutherners alike have defined, understood, interpreted, and collectively remembered the South. This discourse includes language, narratives, and images, in addition to social practices. Indeed, even when we think we are speaking about southern hospitality as actual social practices (whether of antebellum planters or of contemporary readers of Southern Living magazine), these practices achieve their meaning—their recognition as southern hospitality—only in relation to this broader discursive system of southern hospitality and its long history of repetition and citation, for nothing can have meaning outside discourse.¹⁰

The Southern Hospitality Myth explores the cultural work that this discourse has performed in the national imaginary for the past two centuries. More specifically, I argue that this myth has served as a master discourse about race in America, consistently encoding American racial ideologies in a regressive manner. Rather than promoting an ethics of universal welcome, the discourse of southern hospitality has expressed a retrograde politics of exclusion. First against the backdrop of sectional strife and later in the wake of the fratricidal Civil War, the southern hospitality myth has been used to create and promote a sense of transregional white community, solidarity, and privilege. It has done so by naturalizing and extending the racial hierarchies of slavery and segregation and by consistently portraying black Americans as either an invisible or an alien population, incapable of being assimilated into mainstream American culture. Historically considered, then, southern hospitality has functioned primarily as a white mythology, produced by whites, directed to a white audience, and invested in the project of maintaining white status and privilege. Only in the wake of the civil rights movement and the subsequent return of many African Americans to the South has this myth slowly, fitfully begun to be renovated in potentially more inclusive ways. The exclusionary patterns of the past, however, still persist.¹¹

Foregrounding the historical gap between the ethical ideal of hospitality and the restrictive politics of southern hospitality, I examine a range of texts and forms (travel writing, fiction, conduct and etiquette books, sermons, political discourse, travel and tourism literature, advertisements, film, cookbooks, and lifestyle magazines, among others) to show that while the discourse of southern hospitality has been constantly adapted to suit changing conditions and needs, its underlying racial meaning remained constant. While the southern hospitality myth has been an important vehicle for self-definition among southerners over the past two centuries, it has simultaneously provided one of the main tropes through which nonsoutherners have imagined their relationship with the region.¹² Faced with a series of real, national conflicts and traumas associated with the South—slavery, sectionalism, secession, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the long struggle for civil rights—Americans have consistently relied on the discourse of southern hospitality to help them connect, in their imaginations at least, the region to the nation, and the South of the past to the South of the present.¹³ As a system of representation, the discourse of southern hospitality forms an axis around which numerous perceptions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century southern culture have revolved: ideas of home and community; relations with outsiders and strangers; the sense of a distinct regional identity and regional pride; the image of an agrarian lifestyle of leisure; the rise of travel, tourism, and hospitality industries in the postbellum and modern South; and social hierarchies of class, gender, and—most subtly and yet most ubiquitously—race. Southern hospitality has functioned as a free-floating nostalgic image, an effective commercial concept, and a consumer commodity. To northerners faced with the pressures of industrialization and modernization both before and after the Civil War, it provided a nostalgic image of a simpler, better time and a regional ideal upon which to hang the hopes of regional reconciliation in spite of sectional political tension and fratricidal war. To southerners, it has consistently stood as an image of regional pride, exceptionalism, and superiority. To nonsoutherners and southerners alike, the discourse of southern hospitality has provided an adaptable means for imagining amicable political and social relations between the region and the nation, despite the injustices of slavery and segregation.¹⁴ Slavery and segregation are absolutely antithetical to the ethics of hospitality, yet southern hospitality has generally been a basic assumption in the national imaginary for the past two centuries. The persistence and proliferation of the southern hospitality myth can be seen as a corollary of the nation’s centuries-long failure to fulfill its original promise of an inclusive, democratic republic. Indeed, as a particularly subtle yet tenacious form of cultural memory, it has both enabled and ameliorated this failure.

To briefly introduce the racial politics underpinning the discourse of southern hospitality, I would like to consider a Life magazine cartoon from a special Dixie issue published in 1925 (figure 1). The title of the cartoon is That Southern Hospitality, and it provides something of a paradigmatic image for this study, illustrating the fraught ethical and political dimensions within the discourse of southern hospitality, as well as the politics of collective memory. The focal point of the cartoon is the two figures standing in the foreground, both of whom are white: an older southern gentleman is speaking to a younger man, a guest who has apparently just arrived for an overnight visit. The two seem to be looking out a window, with the young man gazing over the older man’s shoulder. In the caption, the older southerner tells the guest, I’ve given you, sah, the guest chamber overlooking where the mint bed used to be. Perhaps in the past the mint juleps flowed freely but no more. The hospitality exchange taking place in this image is marked by nostalgia and a palpable sense of declension: the older generation is speaking to the younger generation, and the man’s words carry a subtle reminder of how things used to be but unfortunately no longer are. The suggested exchange between the figures in the cartoon’s foreground conveys a reverence and longing for the idealized image of the Old South, but the third figure in the cartoon—an African American servant standing behind the two men—both complicates and confirms this meaning. The black servant appears to be dropping off the guest’s luggage and overhearing the conversation, seemingly unnoticed—or at least unacknowledged—by the two central figures. Despite the servant’s background role, his presence truly confirms the picture’s meaning. His position in this background service role—excluded and unacknowledged—confirms the identity of the main figures: their social standing, their superiority, their community of belonging, in short, their whiteness. In the social practices of antebellum southern hospitality, the slave was perpetually present and perpetually unacknowledged and excluded, both relied on for service and reviled for supposed racial inferiority. This racism cannot be separated from the antebellum social practices of southern hospitality; indeed, it was the labor of the slave that provided the master the leisure to be so hospitable. Consider, for example, Thomas Jefferson’s architectural design at Monticello and particularly his creation of a complex system of dumbwaiters designed to entirely conceal the toiling of dozens of slaves as he and his guests dined on the fruits of their unseen labor.¹⁵ Likewise, for much of the history of the discourse of southern hospitality, the black slave, servant, or citizen has been perpetually present and perpetually excluded. This constructed status as perpetual outsider has similarly been used to confirm the solidarity, superiority, and community of white American identity.

FIGURE 1. That Southern Hospitality. Cartoon from January 15, 1925, issue of Life magazine.

While southern hospitality—the hospitality of slavery and segregation—has generally been lauded and memorialized in American culture, many instances when the southern hospitality myth has been contested have been forgotten, as have the many voices of reformers, antislavery advocates, abolitionists, and African Americans who have proposed more progressive visions of hospitality as a possible model for a more inclusive republic. As a study devoted to interpreting the cultural significance of the southern hospitality myth in the national imaginary, this book attempts to recover some of these debates and alternative discourses and thereby provide a fuller historical perspective. By considering both the political and the ethical dimensions surrounding this discourse of southern hospitality, we can better understand the persistence of its appeal in the past and also begin to imagine how it may be shaped in the future, for as an ethical question, hospitality is as relevant today as it was in the past.

To counter the common practice of viewing southern hospitality as a natural and essential cultural attribute of the South, I would like to consider Richard Gray’s comments on regional identification and southern self-fashioning, for his comments provide a useful starting point for the consideration of southern hospitality as discourse. As Gray writes in the foreword to South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture, "The South has customarily defined itself against a kind of photographic negative, a reverse image of itself with which it has existed in a mutually determining, reciprocally defining relationship. The South is what the North is not, just as the North is what the South is not. Gray goes on to explain that while such acts of southern self-fashioning are not fake, they are fictive in the sense of being imaginatively created and sustained. First, they are fictive because they involve a reading of existence as essence and form a notion of a cultural ‘type’ based on a real specificity but divorced from history. Second, they are fictive in that they deny the real diversity of southern cultures by positing one South that is stamped with an inalienable, nonevolutive character. But as Gray reminds us, readings of the South are just that, readings—of its past, present, and possible futures, the plurality of its cultures; for better or worse, [these readings] . . . involve a figuring and, in the purest sense of the word, a simplifying of history."¹⁶

Gray’s comments, like Wallerstein’s cited earlier, provide a useful framework for rethinking southern hospitality more broadly as a set of discursive practices rather than just as social practices. Clearly any utterance of the phrase southern hospitality implicitly signifies its opposite: northern reserve, aloofness, or haughtiness—a general lack of hospitality. Moreover, while southern hospitality may have first existed in history as social habits of the antebellum planter classes, it also exists as discourse divorced from this specific history, as a meaning-making story told about the South and southerners. Such discursive practices are essential to southern self-fashioning, which Gray concisely describes as the interplay of speech acts and communal ritual: Southern self-fashioning . . . has surely not altered since the invention of the South. It is a matter of language and communal ritual, the human habit of positioning the self with the help of the word and others, giving a local habitation and a name to things to secure their and our identity, and establishing a connection or kinship with other people that is also an anchorage, a validation of oneself.¹⁷ But a long view of southern hospitality shows that in the give-and-take between speech acts and social rituals described here by Gray, language can eventually trump practice. Perhaps southern hospitality initially came into being as a reflection of actual social practices associated with the antebellum planter classes, but over its long history of iterations the phrase became unmoored and increasingly removed from these restricted antebellum origins—so much so that the utterance of southern hospitality is like a performative speech act: it is the expression of southern hospitality that creates southern hospitality.

New research tools available through digitized databases allow us to begin to quantify and consequently visualize these historical trends in the usage of the phrase southern hospitality. Consider the graph in figure 2, which shows the frequency of the use of southern hospitality between 1700 and 2000 in over 5,195,769 digitized books available on Google Books.¹⁸ While this data is hardly definitive, it is nonetheless highly suggestive. Notice that the first usages of southern hospitality occur in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century; I should add that nearly all of these are from a passage in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Rob Roy and do not refer to the American South at all. While cultural historians often locate the origins of the social practices that came to be identified as southern hospitality in the 1700s and the colonial era, writers of that period were more likely to refer more specifically to the hospitality of Virginians, Carolinians, Georgians, and the like.¹⁹ In contrast, this graph shows that the earliest uses of southern hospitality in American culture actually occurred in the mid-1820s, and it only seemed to become a common expression between the 1830s and the 1860s. This does not mean that southerners were exceptionally hospitable during these decades; rather, this was a period of increasing political tension and animosity between the South and the North over slavery. In other words, the discourse of southern hospitality was not simply an emergent linguistic reflection of pleasant social practices; instead, it emerged as a mode of persuasion in the sectional crisis over slavery. As political tension increased between the North and the South, residents of southern states increasingly imagined and defined themselves as the South, as members of a distinct, separate, and superior culture in opposition to the North. As a phrase repeated again and again, southern hospitality became a form of shorthand in the national imaginary for a host of attributes and associations identified with southern culture, foundational among these being the South’s racialized cultural hierarchy. My claim here that southern hospitality emerged and proliferated as a discourse during this period of sectional crisis is very much in line with Trish Loughran’s thesis in The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870. As Loughran shows, only in the 1830s and 1840s did a ‘national’ print culture emerge in America. But rather than enhancing national identity, this development led to profound cultural fragmentation as Americans recognized their deep regional divisions, particularly over slavery. According to Loughran, the more connected regions appeared to be (in print), the more regionalized (rather than nationalized) their identities became.²⁰ The discourse of southern hospitality is unique in that it both embodied and alleviated this paradox of regional and national identity, emphasizing regional distinctiveness while simultaneously promising (to white Americans, at least) an imagined sense of welcome and connection to the South.

FIGURE 2. Google Ngram Viewer graph illustrating the frequency of the use of southern hospitality between 1700 and 2000 in over five million digitized books available on Google Books.

To return to figure 2, also notice that the frequency of usage of southern hospitality drops off sharply during the Civil War (1861–65) and Reconstruction (1865–77), but that it increases quite steadily as the Civil War recedes in the distance and a nostalgia industry surrounding the Old South emerges in the late