The growth of American thought by Curti Merle (Merle Eugene) 1897-1996

Author:Curti, Merle (Merle Eugene), 1897-1996
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Filosofie, Geistesgeschichte
Publisher: New York, London, Harper & Brothers
Published: 1943-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

vated feelings and noble sentiments of the northern humanitarians. Nor was he merely the childish, docile, loyal, and at times rascally creature southern whites were prone to make him. He was probably all these things, since individual and class differences are present in Negroes as in whites. He was also snobbish in his disregard for Negroes less privileged than himself, and religious with an emotional tenseness heightened by his need for an outlet. Supematuralist and realist at the same time, he was finally an artist, as the great beauty of the songs he sang will always testify.

The Poor Whites and the Yeomanry

The so-called poor white is not to be confused with the much larger and far more important yeoman class. The poor white's environment —the sand barrens or the sterile soils abandoned by the planter, or the mountains and hills—fashioned his outlook on life just as the slave's environment molded his. If he was as ignorant of book learning as the Negro, he differed from the black man in disparaging it. This was in part the result of a "sour-grapes mechanism" and in part an expression of his deep-seated suspicion and hatred of the cultured planting class. Like the Negro a frequent victim of hookworm, he was sapped of vitality and ambition. His color, which almost alone differentiated him from the free Negro, became in his mind a fetish, and this accounts not only for his hatred of the Negro but also for his willingness to accept and support the institution of slavery. He may have dimly suspected or even in some cases have been conscious of some of the arguments against slavery which Hinton Rowan Helper, a North Carolinian of yeoman background, expressed in The Impending Crisis (1857), a book which the planting aristocracy largely succeeded in suppressing. Helper maintained that slavery degraded the poor white by forcing him to compete unequally with slave labor and by crowding him from the richer lands, which the planter could always buy, into the poorer and exhausted soils of abandoned plantations or steep, eroded hillsides. Often proud, bellicose in his clan-nishness but wanting in ambition, superstitious and at times given to an indulgence in a primitive sort of revivalism, the poor white really possessed but one esthetically satisfying way of expressing himself, his

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.