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Scot A. French

Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 1995, pp. 9-18 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/scu.1995.0049

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What Is Social Memory?

Scot A. French

In planning our conference on social memory and southern history, one question
arose again and again: What is social memory?
Good question.
Social memory is a concept used by historians and others to explore the
connection between social identity and historical memory. It asks how and why
diverse peoples come to think of themselves as members of a group with a shared
(though not necessarily agreed upon) past: Hatfields and McCoys, southerners
and northerners, blacks and whites, natives and immigrants, Americans all. Some

historians use the term "collective memory," placing the emphasis on the internalization of group identities. I prefer the term "social memory" because it calls
attention to the social contexts in which people shape their group identities and
debate their conflicting perceptions of the past.
The concept of social memory is relatively new to the historical profession. It builds on recent theoretical developments in sociology, anthropology,
literary criticism, and psychology. In 1989, the Journal ofAmerican History devoted
an entire issue to the theme of "Memory and American History," noting the
recent surge of scholarly interest in the subject. After surveying the literature in
other disciplines, editor David Thelen laid out a research agenda for historians.

"The historical study of memory," he wrote, "would be the study of how families,
larger gatherings of people, and formal organizations selected and interpreted
identifying memories to serve changing needs. It would explore how people

together searched for common memories to meet present needs, how they first
recognized such a memory and then agreed, disagreed, or negotiated over its
meaning, and finally how they preserved and absorbed that meaning into their
ongoing concerns." Thelen saw the study of memory opening new fields of

inquiry for historians. For too long historians had dismissed memory as a poor
substitute for history, a partial or distorted version of what had really happened.
The study of memory would reacquaint historians with the ways in which non-

historians thought about the past, the ways in which they talked about history
and used it to make sense of the world around them.1

Aln Confino, a University of Virginia historian who is studying the com-

10Southern Cultures

mercialization of memory in modem Germany, attributes the rise of scholarly

interest in memory to several factors: the decline of the historian's traditional
role as guardian of a singular national identity; the proliferation of "countermemories" among groups searching for their historical origins; and the role of
the mass media in turning an ever-growing number of collective memories into

marketable commodities. Geopolitically, the collapse of the Soviet Union and

the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia have focused international attention on the role of memory in forging new national identities and fueling ethnic
conflict.2

Some historians draw a sharp distinction between history and memory.

For them history is a "discipline built on evidence," whereas memory is "a mal-

leable guide to the past." While I agree that historians are guided by a strict set of
rules and conventions for writing about the past, I would argue that the stories
they tell have much in common with the stories told by nonhistorians. In my
view, history is a genre of memory, not just the detached arbiter of it. As professional historians, we tend to favor history over less "disciplined" forms of memory such as fiction, folklore, and autobiography. Yet history is no less malleable
than other guides to the past; new sources, methodologies, and social concerns
allow for constant revision of the stories we tell. By the same token, Hollywood
filmmakers and Disney Imagineers look to history for inspiration and legitimation
while adhering to their own sets of rules and conventions. History feeds off other

forms of memory, just as they feed off of history. I hope the papers presented in
this volume will shed some light on the similarities and differences between history and other genres of memory.
We conceived of this national graduate student conference as a way to
look at southern history from a new perspective. And yet, a skeptic might legiti-

mately ask: Is this perspective really new? The study of changing historical interpretations sounds much like professional historiography, which first evolved into
a modern sociology of knowledge in the twenties and thirties. The study of popular images sounds strikingly similar to the myth-and-symbol studies first popularized in the fifties and sixties. And the study of historical "narratives," with its
evocation of lit-crit theory, sounds like old-fashioned intellectual history retooled
for the postmodern age. Perhaps a review of the relevant literature will help clarify some of the similarities and differences between what we call "social memory"
and previous approaches to the subject.
The earliest scholarly analyses of the link between social identity and
southern history focused on the willful distortion of the truth about the southern
past, the self-aggrandizement of one group at the expense of another. Social critics with strong southern allegiances charged that propagandists had distorted
southern history for their own selfish purposes. The debate intensified in the
1930s as the South, officially designated as "the nation's number one economic

French: What Is Social Memory?1 1

problem," was subjected to scrutiny from without and within. To tell the story of
the South's past was to identify the source of its present malaise; only the proper
diagnosis would yield the proper remedy. Taking science as their model, profes-

sional historians and social critics spoke passionately about the need for a dispassionate history of the South. At stake, they argued, was the health and prosperity of the region and its people.
In his contribution to the 1930 Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand, Vanderbilt historian Frank Lawrence Owsley complained that southern memories of
the Civil War and Reconstruction were based largely on northern propaganda,
despite the efforts of southern-born scholars to set the record straight. Northern-

ers, in effect, had colonized southern thought, using northern textbooks and
northern schoolteachers to wage a "second war of conquest." Southern children
grew up believing that the South "had no history, or that its history was tainted
with slavery and rebellion" and must be repudiated. Owsley set out to debunk
what he called the "Northern legend" of the sectional conflict and replace it with
his own authoritative account based on unbiased scholarship. He described the
Civil War as "an irrepressible conflict" between two civilizations, the agrarian
South and an expanding commercial-industrial North. He called the issue of slavery "a red herring" introduced by Abraham Lincoln and other partisan figures to
clothe northern self-interest in "the robes of morality." Owsley praised the work of
several southern writers who had challenged the "Northern legend" in recent
years. "Not all the Southern minds, fortunately, were conquered by the Northern conquest," Owsley wrote, explaining his own narrow escape. For Owsley,
southern intellectuals held the key to the regeneration of the southern people

and the survival of the southern way of life. As educated men, proud of the southern agrarian tradition, they would take their stand against the willful distortion of
their history and the obliteration of their identity by hostile outsiders.3
In 1935, the black scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois offered a similar

critique of the historical profession from a very different perspective. In an essay

entitled "The Propaganda of History," attached as an appendix to his magisterial
Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois accused white historians, northerners and
southerners alike, of willfully miseducating American children. These historians
were too ashamed of the evils in their national past, too eager to defend the social
groups with which they identified, to tell the truth about slavery, the Civil War,
and Reconstruction. Du Bois asked why these historians ignored the testimony of
slaves in telling the story of slavery, why they failed to mention the efforts of
blacks in telling the story of the Civil War and emancipation, why they relied
on "the unsupported evidence of men who hated and despised Negroes" rather
than government records in telling the story of Reconstruction. Where Owsley
focused on sectional biases in the shaping of historical memory, Du Bois focused
on both sectional and racial prejudices. "In order to paint the South as a martyr

12Southern Cultures

to inescapable fate, to make the North the magnanimous emancipator, and to

ridicule the Negro as the impossible joke in the whole development," Du Bois
wrote, "we have in fifty years, by libel, innuendo, and silence, so completely misstated and obliterated the history of the Negro in America and his relation to its
work and government that today it is almost unknown." Du Bois urged American
historians to approach their work as scientists rather than racial or sectional propagandists. History loses its value as incentive and example, Du Bois argued,
when it serves only to "support a prejudice or buttress a lie."4
Both Owsley and Du Bois identified professional historians as key figures in
the shaping of social memory. Both subscribed to the professional ideal of objectivity, despite their recognition that partisanship and ideology permeated some of
the most widely accepted and officially sanctioned accounts. And both took an
instrumentalist view of the problem, highlighting what they considered the conscious and willful distortion of a shared national past for partisan or parochial
purposes. Theirs was a polemical historiography, an attempt to use scholarship as
both a weapon and a shield in the social struggles of the day.
The second phase in the study of social identity and southern history
focused on the power of popular culture, broadly defined, to shape perceptions
of the past. In this phase, historians of the South explored the susceptibility of
"the Southern mind"or, more broadly, "the American mind"to myths and
legends, which (in their minds) impeded social progress and obscured historical
fact. These writers set out to understand the psychological appeal of certain stories
about the southern past, the historical conditions that fostered the acceptance of
myths and legends and hindered a more accurate understanding of social reality.
Wilbur J. Cash launched this phase of historiography in 1941 with the publication of The Mind of the South, an extended essay that combined revisionist
history with social critique. Cash set out to debunk what he called "the correlated legends" of Old South (a European-style society divided into aristocratic
cavaliers and poor white trash) and New South (industrialized and modernized
and thoroughly Americanized). These legends, Cash argued, bore "little relation
to reality." Cash stressed the almost mindless continuity of southern thought and
southern social relations in the years before and after the Civil War. He attributed southern historical consciousness to a distinctive folk culture that grew out
of the unique agricultural conditions of the southern past. Poor white southerners, oblivious to their own exploitation and humiliation, embraced the romantic
myth of the Old South and its aristocratic pretensions. Cash traced the roots of
their apathy and accomodation to a distinctive southern mythology.5
In 1961 William R. Taylor brought the interdisciplinary insights and literary orientation of American studies to the study of southern mythology in his
pathbreaking book, Cavalier and Yankee. Taylor, steeped in the nationalist ethos
and consensus historiography of the day, rejected the notion of a divided Amer-

French: What Is Social Memory?13

ican culture embodied in the myths of "Cavalier" and "Yankee." He linked the
paired myths to the search for an ideal "national character" that would combine
the best qualities from all of the regions and ensure the survival of the republic.
Ironically, the popularization and political mobilization of these myths con-

tributed to a very real sectional conflict and helped to bring on the Civil War.
Taylor measured the popularity of the myths by the frequency of their appearance
in popular literature, an innovative use of source materials. He explained their
persistence long after the Civil War by lodging them in a shared "national character" rather than a dull or brooding southern mind.6
C. Vann Woodward, the preeminent southern historian of the era, welcomed the shift in scholarly emphasis from southern mythology to national

mythmaking. In a 1958 article entitled "The Search for Southern Identity," Woodward complained that most, if not all, of the South's cherished myths had been
debunked, leaving the "myth-denuded" southerner in danger of subscribing to
national myths. Woodward urged his fellow southerners to hold on to their mem-

ories of a distinctive southern past, for their shared experiences of "frustration,

failure, and defeat" had given them a realistic perspective that would serve the
nation well. Southerners who accepted "the burden of southern history" could
inject a healthy dose of irony into the national myths of success, abundance,
and innocence.7

While Woodward saw little more to be gained from the study of southern
myths, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill historian George Tindall saw

the study of mythology as "a new frontier in Southern history." In a 1964 essay
Tindall argued that "the various mythical images of the South have yet to be
subjected to the kind of broad and imaginative analysis that has been applied to

the idea of the West." Tindall suggested that historians move beyond the
debunking of myths to a broader understanding of their social and cultural significance. He urged historians to build upon the conceptual framework established by anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, and literary critics. Tindall
proceeded to suggest some of the mythical images of the South that historians
might analyze: The Pro-slavery South, the States Rights South, the Fighting
South, the Lazy South, the South of Jazz and Blues, the Liberal South of the

Interracial Movement, the White Supremacist South, etc. His list of mythical
Souths went on and on. Tindall did not explain what made these images of the
South mythical; all of them had some basis in empirical reality, he noted, yet all
were somehow inadequate or misleading. The task of the historian, as Tindall
saw it, was to point out the "blind spots" in these popular perceptions of the
South, to call attention to those features of the southern past that were missing
or obscured. Tindall assumed that historians could see the big picture; their professional training and scholarly detachment enabled them to step outside their
own culture and gaze back at it with a critical eye.8

14Southern Cultures

Tindall cited the exemplary work of University of Virginia historian Paul

Gaston, who was then studying how the image of the New South had evolved
from "creed" into "myth" in the late nineteenth century. The New South creed
promoted by Henry Grady and like-minded boosters described the South as they
thought it ought to be; the creed became a myth, Gaston explained, when it purported to describe the South as it already was. The creed was a conscious statement; Gaston profiled some of the key figures who helped to define and publicize
it. The myth was a more generalized, unconsciously held belief. Gaston attributed the appeal of the myth to the frustration and failure experienced by southerners and the need for "intellectual and emotional compensations." Like Cash
before him, Gaston looked to social psychology to explain the inability of southerners to see the world as it really was. Southerners were not so much the victims of northern propaganda, as Owsley had argued, but rather the victims of
self-deception and wishful thinking.9
Few of these studies of southern mythology probed the collective mentality of the black people who lived in the South; few, if any, explored the myths and
legends that the slaves and their descendants lived by. Liberal white historians of
the civil rights era, anxious to document a tradition of black resistance and rebellion, showed little interest in exploring the social-psychological dimensions of
apathy and accommodation among black southerners. Black nationalists were
far more likely to acknowledge the damaging influence of white myths on the
black psyche; the "whitewashing" of American history, they maintained, had led
to the glorification of slaveholder-statesmen and the denial of racial oppression in
the slaveholding South. "When I see some poor old brainwashed Negroesyou

mention Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Patrick Henry, they just
swoon, you know, with patriotism," Malcolm X told a Harlem audience in 1965.
"But they don't realize that in the sight of George Washington, you were a sack of
potatoes. Youyeswere a sack of potatoes, a barrel of molasses, you amounted
to nothing, in the sight of Washington, or in the sight of Jefferson, or Hamilton,
and some of those other so-called founding fathers."10 For advocates of "black
power" and "black consciousness," the writing of black history became a crusade
to instill pride in black people, to erase any vestiges of a "slave mentality," and to
honor the role of black heroes in the black freedom struggle.
Not everyone welcomed the recognition of blacks as a "quasi-national"
group with a separate history and distinctive historical consciousness. In an essay
entitled "The Mythmakers of American History," delivered as the 1968 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, Stanford historian
Thomas A. Bailey argued that the authors of black history textbooks threatened to
push "significant white men" aside to make room for "much less significant black
men." Bailey saw myth-making at work in the "apotheosis" of Crispus Attucks as
a black Revolutionary War hero. Attucks may or may not have been black, Bailey

French: What Is Social Memory?15

argued, and his deeds hardly qualified him as an American hero anyway. Black
pressure to rewrite the history of slavery represented another kind of distortion.
"The luckless African Americans while in slavery were essentially in jail; and we

certainly would not write the story of a nation in terms of its prison population,"
Bailey wrote. "Yet the pressure is on to overstress Negro initiative in organizing

revolts, in escaping from bondage, and in securing emancipation." Bailey urged

his fellow historians to resist pressure from black militants to rewrite the history
books. "This determination to stand American history on its head, so characteristic of minority groups, may stimulate pride among Negroes, but it can win little support from true scholarship."11

The objections of Bailey and others were swept away by the rising tide of
social history, with its "bottom-up" perspective on American history. In the introduction to his 1977 book, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Lawrence Levine
argued that it was "time for historians to expand their own consciousness by

examining the consciousness of those they have hitherto ignored or neglected."

Levine suggested that historians had been hampered, in part, by their rigid definition of sources, favoring those groups with written, easily accessible records.
For his study, Levine focused instead on "the orally transmitted expressive culture
of Afro-Americans" songs, folktales, proverbs, aphorisms, jokes, verbal games,

and long narrative oral poems. Levine did not refer to the stories African-Americans told themselves as "myths" or "legends" but rather as "folk thought," a term
that shifted the scholarly focus from accuracy to authenticity.12

While Levine expanded the study of memory to include black southerners,

he relied on the same prefabricated group boundaries as the historians who studied "the American mind" and "the Southern mind." He did not show how slaves

constructed their various social identities, how they came to think of themselves
as "black" despite differences of color and social status; he simply filled a preexisting "black mind" with a "consciousness" presumably shared by all members of
the group. ("It can be repeated for many other groups in American history,"
Levine wrote of his method.) Nevertheless, Levine showed how the popular mind,

previously portrayed as susceptible to myth and easily misled, could be recast as

a positive, integrative force in the creation and sustenance of community.
The third phase in the study of social memory and southern history introduced the idea of the South as an organizing concept, a mental mapping of
"imagined communities," born of social struggle but divorced from any "under-

lying positivist reality."13 Michael O'Brien explained the implications of this

approach in the introduction to his 1979 book, The Idea of the American South,
1920-1941. "In Southern terms," he wrote, "this is a choice between seeing the
South itself as an idea, used to organize and comprehend disparate facts of social

reality, or viewing the South as a solid and integrated social reality about which
there have been disparate ideas." For generations, historians had been searching

16Southern Cultures

for a central theme of southern history, the essence of southern distinctiveness,

the real South obscured by so many mythical Souths. By the late 1970s theoretical developments in other disciplines had begun to corrode the idea of the
"South" at the core of southern history. O'Brien viewed the South as a social construct with no essential or preexisting qualities, only man-made attributes. For
him, there was no collective "mind of the South," filled with distorted images of

the past, no underlying reality of the South accessible to unbiased scholars

only ideas about the South, subject to challenge and change over time. O'Brien
called attention to the high degree of self-consciousness with which people talked

about the South and its past during the interwar years; his emphasis on "high"
intellectual history allowed him to historicize certain ideas about the South that
previous scholars had sought to canonize or debunk.14
Recently Edward Ayers has extended this approach to more mundane and

previously disregarded realms of southern experience. In The Promise of the New

South: Life after Reconstruction (1992), Ayers shows how people living in the postbellum South made sense of the changes that came with the abolition of slavery

and the rapid expansion of market capitalism, how they gave meaning and moral
significance to those changes and ordered their lives accordingly. While Ayers is
not generally regarded as a student of memory, his work shows how people living
in the South shaped their various group identities around perceptions of the
region's past and its relationship to the present and future. Ayers explores "the
idea of the American South" as expressed in "the promise of the New South," a
theme infused with multiple meanings and embedded in everything from music
to religion to politics. By allowing his subjects to define the promise of the New

South for themselves, Ayers illustrates the great diversity of thought and experience within the socially constructed boundaries of the region. His book is filled
with voices in open-ended dialogue: sharecroppers, shopkeepers, Democrats, Populists, preachers, teachers, miners, millworkers, fiction writers, blues singers, the
rich and the poor, the famous and the obscure. Ayers provides the context for

these texts, cutting and pasting them together in ways that challenge any simple
generalizations about the South. His book is a model for students of social memory, historicizing various conceptions of southern identity without stigmatizing or
sanitizing particular points of view.15
Which brings me back to my original question: Does social memory offer

a new perspective on southern history? The answer, I would argue, is yes and no.
Social memory resembles the historiography of Owsley and Du Bois in its
view of professional historians as influential figures whose authority is, for better
or for worse, contested and whose claims often rest on shaky empirical foundations. Social memory differs from their brand of polemical historiography in its

willingness to abandon the "objectivity myth" and treat perceptions of the past as
more or less persuasive. Students of social memory acknowledge the selectivity of

French: What Is Social Memory?1 7

subject matter, the manipulation of evidence, and changing definitions of "truth"

as problematicyet, for rhetorical purposes, necessaryconditions of historical writing. They also recognize the influence of nonhistorians in shaping historical perceptions. In looking beyond professional historians and their relatively

small communities of discourse, students of social memory burst the boundaries

of traditional historiography and expose all forms of historical memory to social
and cultural analysis.

Social memory resembles the myth-and-symbol school of Taylor and Gaston in its concern with the mediation of historical knowledge through various
genres of popular culture, from newspaper editorials to pulp fiction. Social memory differs in its reluctance to postulate group identities or catalog the contents of
a collective "mind" or "consciousness." Social memory focuses on the construction of group boundaries, a process that reveals the multiplicity of meanings individuals attach to shared experiences and the intense struggles that take place
within groups over what to remember and what to forget. Where myth-and-symbol scholars treat some historical perceptions as myths and legends and others as
facts, students of social memory recognize such distinctions as part of an ongoing
struggle to legitimize certain perceptions and delegitimize others.
Social memory most closely resembles the approach to southern history
exemplified by O'Brien and Ayers; it builds on the work of previous scholars even
as it critiques and historicizes them. We should not claim too much for ourselves,
however, for humility is one of our hallmarks. Like Gaston and Taylor and Owsley
and Du Bois before us, we are just telling stories about people telling stories about
the South. Our stories should be testaments to the enduring significance of their
stories, not monuments to our own changing perceptions of the past.
Notes

1.This special issue of the Journal of American History was later published in a book;
see David P. Thelen, ed., Memory and American History (Indiana University Press, 1990).
2.Confino has emerged as a leading authority on "collective memory." For his definition and a brief history of the concept, see Aln Confino, "Collective Memory," in The
Encyclopedia ofSoaal History, ed. Peter N. Stearns (Garland, 1994). For an example of how he
has employed the concept in his study of German nationalism, see Confino, "The Nation as a
Local Metaphor: Heimat, National Memory, and the German Empire, 1871-1918," History and
Memory 5 (spring-summer 1993): 42-86. For an ethnographic approach to the study of
memory, see Richard Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec (University of
Wisconsin Press, 1988).

3.Frank Lawrence Owsley, "The Irrepressible Conflict," in I'll Take My Stand: The South
and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners (Louisiana State University Press, 1983),
61-91; first published in 1930.
4.W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Propaganda of History," in Black Reconstruction in America,
1860-1880 (Atheneum, 1985), 711-729; first published in 1935.

18Southern Cultures

5.Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941; reprint, Vintage Books, 1961).
6.William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (1961; reprint, Anchor Books, 1963).

7.C. Vann Woodward, "The Search for Southern Identity," in The Burden of Southern
History (Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 3-25; first published in 1960.
8.George B. Tindall, "Mythology: A New Frontier in Southern History," in The Idea of
the South, ed. Frank E. Vandiver (University of Chicago Press, 1964), 1-15.
9.Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (Alfred A.
Knopf, 1970).

10.Malcolm X on Afro-American History, (1967; reprint, Pathfinder Press, 1990), 77.

11.Thomas A. Bailey, "The Mythmakers of American History," Journal of American
History 55 (June 1968): 5-21.
12.Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk
Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford University Press, 1977).
13.I have borrowed the metaphor of "imagined communities" from Benedict Ander-

son, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; reprint,
Verso, 1991).

14.Michael O'Brien, The Idea of the American South, 1920-1941 (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1979).

15.Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (Oxford
University Press, 1992).