Culture of The Southern United States - Popular Images of Southerners

Popular Images of Southerners

Since the early 19th century Northerners have approached the South with perceptions colored by stereotypes, epithets and ridicule. Traces remain in the media, usually in humorous form, as in the 1960s TV series, "The Beverly Hillbillies," a situation comedy, which depicts the cultural dissonance of a poor backwoods family that moves to upscale California after striking oil on their land. Many poor Southern whites make fun of the stereotypes. Images typically depict Southerners as laid-back, hospitable, jolly and carefree--and lazy. The hostile epithet "White trash" originated among house slaves in the 1830s to ridicule poor whites of low morality.

From the colonial eras travelers often emphasized the backward, uneducated, uncouth, dirty or unhygienic, impoverished, and violent aspects of Southern life. A favorite theme especially regarding Appalachia and the Ozarks portrayed "hicks" isolated from modern culture as shiftless male hunters, violently feuding clans like the Hatfields and McCoys, degraded women smoking corncob pipes,religious snake handlers, and compulsive banjo players.

The national stereotype of the South in 1917 can be glimpsed in a study of tobacco usage in the late 19th century written by a Northern historian who paid close attention to class and gender:

The chewing of tobacco was well-nigh universal. This habit had been widespread among the agricultural population of America both North and South before the war. Soldiers had found the quid a solace in the field and continued to revolve it in their mouths upon returning to their homes. Out of doors where his life was principally led the chewer spat upon his lands without offense to other men, and his homes and public buildings were supplied with spittoons. Brown and yellow parabolas were projected to right and left toward these receivers, but very often without the careful aim which made for cleanly living. Even the pews of fashionable churches were likely to contain these familiar conveniences. The large numbers of Southern men, and these were of the better class (officers in the Confederate army and planters, worth $20,000 or more, and barred from general amnesty) who presented themselves for the pardon of President Johnson, while they sat awaiting his pleasure in the ante-room at the White House, covered its floor with pools and rivulets of their spittle. An observant traveller in the South in 1865 said that in his belief seven-tenths of all persons above the age of twelve years, both male and female, used tobacco in some form. Women could be seen at the doors of their cabins in their bare feet, in their dirty one-piece cotton garments, their chairs tipped back, smoking pipes made of corn cobs into which were fitted reed stems or goose quills. Boys of eight or nine years of age and half-grown girls smoked. Women and girls "dipped" in their houses, on their porches, in the public parlors of hotels and in the streets.

The Progressive Era focused attention on the problems of the South. An influential scholarly study was Horace Kephart's Our Southern Highlanders (1913), which portrayed an isolated and culturally inert people. The bleak image inspired northern philanthropy, such as the Rockefeller foundations, to intervene using modern public health techniques and to promote better schooling.

Since the 1930s, however, Hollywood has used stereotypes of the South to emphasize what virtues are inherent in simple rural life, as opposed to the corruption that can be found in the city. Representative films include the Ma and Pa Kettle series.

Comic strips dealt with northern urban experiences until 1934, when Al Capp introduced "L'il Abner," the first strip based in the South. Although Capp was from Connecticut, he spent 43 years teaching the world about Dogpatch, reaching 60 million readers in over 900 American newspapers and 100 foreign papers in 28 countries. Inge says Capp, "had a profound influence on the way the world viewed the American South." Other popular strips on Southern life included "Pogo," "Snuffy Smith" and "Kudzu." Cultural historian Anthony Harkins argues that Dogpatch's hillbilly setting "remained a central touchstone, serving both as a microcosm and a distorting carnival mirror of broader American society."