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~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: The South

Why Do Southerners Like Football So Much?

20 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Interview, Sports

≈ Comments Off on Why Do Southerners Like Football So Much?

Tags

America, American Football, American History, Americana, Football, Friday Night Lights, interview, Mark Halperin, Sports, Stuart Stevens, The Last Season, The Last Season: A Father a Son and a Lifetime of College Football, The South, With All Due Respect

Stuart Stevens

Mark Halperin: Why is football such a big deal in the South?

Stuart Stevens: It’s actually a profound question. In part it’s because the South had no professional teams for many years, and that had an impact on the “Friday Night Lights” atmosphere that you had. I think that for a long time, when the South wasn’t very good at much, it was good at football – so there was an inverse pride in football which people clung to. I also think that there is something about the violence of football that appeals to southerners in a special way.

And the way in which football has changed the culture of the South, particularly the racial elements of the South… I find fascinating. It’s parallel with rugby in South Africa. It really was the first time, for many southerners, that blacks and whites cheered for each other, and meant it, and that’s been a very powerful force.

__________

From Stevens’s interview with Halperin on With All Due Respect in September.

Stevens, who was the top strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, took leave from work the year after the failed run. In this time, he and his 95-year-old dad (pictured above) committed to revive their long dormant family tradition and attend every Ole Miss football game that season. You can read about their experiences and Stevens’s reflections on family, legacy, and the South in his new book The Last Season: A Father, a Son, and a Lifetime of College Football (I haven’t read the book, but you can see a short introduction below).

There’s more:

  • Teddy Roosevelt’s essay about football and American manhood
  • Shelby Foote discusses what the Civil War sounded like
  • John Updike describes the American autumns of his boyhood

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Shelby Foote: Why Some Who Opposed Slavery Fought for the South

01 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, War

≈ Comments Off on Shelby Foote: Why Some Who Opposed Slavery Fought for the South

Tags

American History, Appomattox, Civil War, Confederacy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, peace, Secession, Shelby Foote, slavery, The North, The South, Union, War

Confederate Soldiers 3

“Foote gestured toward a framed certificate on the wall from the United Confederate Veterans. It was dated 1892 and honored his great-great-grandfather, Colonel Hezekiah William Foote. Before the war, Hezekiah owned five plantations and over one hundred slaves. ‘I was given clearly to understand as a child that I was a Southern aristocrat,’ Foote said.

His great-grandfather had opposed secession but fought without hesitation for the South. ‘Just as I would have,’ Foote said. ‘I’d be with my people, right or wrong. If I was against slavery, I’d still be with the South. I’m a man, my society needs me, here I am. The difference between the North and the South in the war is that there was no stigma attached to the Northern man who paid two hundred dollars to not go to war, or who hired a German replacement. In the South you could have done that, but no one would. You’d have been scorned.’

Foote’s retroactive allegiance to the Confederacy surprised me. It was the honor-bound code of the Old South. One’s people before one’s principles. The straitjacket of scorn and stigma. ‘It’s a bunch of shit really,’ Foote conceded. ‘But all Southerners subscribe to this code to some degree, at least male Southerners of my generation.’ In Foote’s view, this same stubborn pride had sustained Southerners during the Civil War. ‘It’s what kept them going through Appomattox, that attitude of “I won’t give up, I won’t be insulted.”’

It took almost a century after Appomattox for Confederate blood to cool. Southerners’ ‘abiding love’ for Franklin Delano Roosevelt tempered their prideful regionalism, Foote said; so, too, did the patriotic fervor surrounding World War II. It was in 1945 that Mississippians finally dropped their eighty-year ban on celebrating Independence Day. This was also when many Southerners stopped referring to the Civil War as the War Between the States. ‘It was a big admission, if you think about it,’ Foote said. ‘A Civil war is a struggle between two parts of one nation, which implies that the South was never really separate or independent.'”

Shelby Foote 2

__________

Excerpted from Tony Horwitz’s chronicle of the south’s Lost Cause nearly a century and a half later Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.

More warfare:

  • Foote relates what Yankees and Confederates sounded like in battle
  • William Tecumseh Sherman describes war as “glory’s moonshine”
  • The first book in the Western canon tells how the rich used to fight

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