If you’re curious about our country’s long history of polarization, look at the term “Southland.” Most Californians don’t know how the greater Los Angeles area earned a nickname commonly associated with the Old South. The story behind this strange juxtaposition provides context for today’s crisis as it relates to regional and political conflicts in the United States and how one opportunistic businessman profited from them.
Since the founding of the Confederacy in 1861, the southeastern United States has come to be widely known as the “Southern Territory.” Before the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, Richmond’s Southern Literary Courier published a poem titled “The South Stands Afraid of its Enemies.” From there, Confederate verses praising “the South” circulated freely.
The Unionists responded with verses of their own. Augustine Duganne, a New York legislator, soldier, and poet asked in an 1863 poem: “What is this whole Southland for/Just a white tomb of sin/So beautiful on the outside but so dirty on the inside? Dirty?
The Civil War ended in 1865, but the nickname and its association with the Confederacy endured. In 1878, a “Southern” poem recited at the Mississippi Press Association convention caused an uproar. The author, Will Kernan, is a well-known extremist who wrote “Song of Hate”, which is extremely misanthropic. Although Kernan was the editor of Mississippi’s Southern States newspaper, he was from Ohio because then, as now, America’s polarization transcended regional lines. In “Southland,” Kernan attacked the 14th and 15th Amendments, which gave black Americans civil rights and black voting rights respectively: “Let the white man’s blessing of the ballot be controlled.”
Iowa’s Mars Sentinel satirized Kernan’s work: “Ho Namland/The sunny Southland/…the land of mulattoes, mulattoes, bastards, mulattoes, Hottentots, robbers, savages/traitors to the core There is also a scrawny female devil…” The Sentinel’s “Southern” was widely reprinted, angering Southerners. In 1880, Mississippi’s Meridian Mercury called for an end to all collaboration with the North: “Above all, love your own sunny South…Avoid all hypocrisy about loving the whole country.” The New York Times ” reprinted and condemned the diatribe of the Mercury.
As newspaper men across the country used “Southern” in verbal sparring, Harrison Gray Otis, editor of the new Los Angeles Daily Times, began doing the same. California had its own North-South rivalry, and Otis chafed at Northern Californians’ arrogant view of the “cow counties” south of the Tehachapi Mountains. He used the Times to fight back, commissioning poems such as Edward Vincent’s “Southern California”: “Time, place, chance, advantage are you/The fairest Southland.” Otis turned down an offer from San Francisco gimmick, like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s response to Neil Young’s anti-Southern insult in “Sweet Home Alabama”: “Sing songs about the South.”
Otis wasn’t the first to call Los Angeles Southland, but he was the loudest, brandishing the word in his aggressive support. In the boom/bust year of 1887, when the San Jose Mercury News encouraged central California to lure tourists away from the “crowded South,” Otis accused the “unfortunate North” of “local jealousy” and denounced its targeting of “this fair and a just nation” conspiracy. Sunny Southland. “
Here, “South” refers to geography. But a month later, The Times accused “all Northern California” of conspiring against the “Southland,” sending agents “to scout the land and send newbies north.” In this case, “Southland” represents a new region. As a New York Times writer explained: “We read a lot about the New South, referring to the southern states of our union. There was a New South in California, and the world was beginning to understand it. California The New South End is increasingly embracing its connection to the Old South End.
On the one hand, this seems appropriate, since early Los Angeles was filled with Southern immigrants who supported the Union. “It must never be forgotten,” declared the San Francisco Gazette in 1862, “that in this day of danger to the republic, the favor of Dixie and DeUnion is two to one in the county of Los Angeles.” But Otis was not a Southerner. He was a Union veteran from Ohio who had fought in the Battle of Antietam.
When Otis promoted southern California, he was not expressing local pride but creating a new territory. He spent his glory days in victory over the old Southland and replicated that victory on the West Coast. “General Otis” borrowed military terminology, calling his Los Angeles mansion “The Campground” and his Times staff “The Phalanx” as he built and ruled a new Southland.
Unfortunately, Otis’s new regime repeated the worst of the old one: it grew into another white oligarchy, where the rich got richer and the working class suffered. Otis made a fortune from real estate speculation His rampant union-busting led to the 1910 Times bombing, which killed 21 people.
It would take another century for Los Angeles to build a better Southland. This work remains unfinished in California and the United States.
Laura Brodie is Professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Her books include Breakthrough: VMI and the Coming of Womanhood.
