"Old," "New," and "problem" Souths: historical change and ideological instability in Thomas Nelson Page's <i>In Ole Virginia</i>

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Introduction Thomas Nelson Page, like William Wirt and John Pendleton Kennedy before him, was part of a tradition of early southern authors as prominent for their roles in government or diplomacy as for their writing. In Page's case, the high point of his diplomatic career came in 1913 when he was appointed US ambassador to Italy by the newly inaugurated President Woodrow Wilson. His political path before then involved some intriguing shifts in allegiance. At one time, he was a supporter of the Republican Theodore Roosevelt, and in 1904 "became involved in . . . his election [as President] by successfully controlling much of the Virginia federal patronage" (Gross 96). Within a decade, however, Page would help to scupper Roosevelt's chances of another presidential term by allying himself with a younger embodiment of progressive politics in Wilson. Despite his initial misgivings about this candidate, Page eventually campaigned vigorously for him, making his support especially clear in an open letter to the New York Times in October 1912 (146). By affiliating himself with the Democratic Party and, indeed, being comfortable enough in this new home to accept Wilson's offer of a diplomatic appointment, Page ultimately conformed to Virginian orthodoxy of the period, with the Democrats carrying the state in every presidential election cycle from 1876 until Herbert Hoover's win for the Republicans in 1928. [End Page 313] In his political pronouncements, Page was a committed supporter of the modernizing and industrializing New South as this was delineated from the 1870s onwards by the visionary Georgian journalist Henry Woodfin Grady and his acolytes. Page's fiction itself was understood by many of its first readers as thoroughly synchronized with this political project: his contemporaries, Wayne Mixon writes, "saw in his stories little to hurt and much to help the New South movement" (34). On initial reflection, such an interpretation may strike us as tenuous, if not perverse. After all, Page's novels and short stories often appear to be compensatory formations, imaginatively recuperating the South's aristocratic and romantic traditions in the face of their actual depletion in the social conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His biographer, Theodore L. Gross, writes that, retrospectively, Page took ideals of southern chivalric heroism to constitute "the armature of a great and fallen civilization" (21). In this perception, he was not markedly different from many of his fellow southerners. With the fall of the slave system, the plantation was often raised nostalgically to the status of near-Utopia, the wealthy slaveholder reimagined as a lordly hero fit to take his place alongside the royals and aristocrats who populated certain strands of European Romanticism (the novels of Sir Walter Scott, for example, to recall work famously considered by Twain a pathogen that resulted in the South's cultural and political degeneration1). Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan identifies just such a project to sentimentalize the plantation in Page's fiction, which she characterizes as "pastorals" that put particular value on "the gracious homeplace" and "the habits of aristocracy as well as agriculture" (36). The temptation is thus to presume a glaring asymmetry between Page's political and literary careers. On the one hand, practical investment in a cause that presented itself as forward-thinking and antipathetic to nostalgia; on the other, romanticization of antebellum Virginia [End Page 314] that looks like a reflex or spasm, post mortem, of that older order, produced by someone hankering for a time that has passed. But we should be cautious about applying to Page's fiction quite such a binary schema, in which "Old" South is strictly demarcated from "New." The reality is more complex, as Mixon argues: "The contrast is forced and exists more in the minds of the critics than in the author himself" (34). Or, we might add, than in the minds of many of Page's contemporaries; as Grady himself wrote in his series "The new South," published first in the New York Ledger in 1889, then in book form the following year...