This is my take on the South's traditional core beliefs, values, and way of life at the tag end of the Old South in the 1940s--which should give some idea as to what our Confederate heritage is. Of course, there were many exceptions to the generalities listed below; here I am simply trying to capture the majority views, so as to identify the startling differences between the ways most Southerners thought and acted back then, and the ways they think and act today. Also, I'm focusing primarily upon what I experienced myself--life in the towns of the South, as being roughly the halfway point between life on the farms, and life in the cities.

IN THE 1940s, THE SOUTH WAS BASICALLY A CONSERVATIVE SOCIETY

The conservative mindset (or overview) shaped not only the South's specific beliefs and values, but also the way we believed a society should be run. As conservatives, we believed in a bare minimum of laws, supplemented with a strong unwritten social-code; and we also recognized that no law can possibly benefit 100% of the society. Our leaders tried for practical laws that would benefit 75% - 80% of the society, knowing that the other 20% - 25% of the time, people would invariably fall through the cracks. That is just a fact of life. If you write legislation to try to benefit 100% of the public, you invariably end up swamped in laws that have unintended consequences which are worse than the ills they are trying to cure. Every time. That is the basic difference between a conservative society and a liberal society: the conservatives believe that all-embracing big government doesn't work; and the liberals believe that big government is the answer to all of man's social ills.

Even though the federal government under FDR was beginning to clutter up our lives back then, by and large in the 1940s the South still had small, manageable governments at state and local levels. They didn't get in our way. So we still led relatively simple, uncomplicated, and enjoyable lives. That was the greatest blessing any group could ask for.

WE LIVED OUR RELIGION

The small-town South that I was familiar with in the 1940s really was the Bible Belt. Basically, it ran under the rules of conservative Southern-Protestant Christianity seven days a week. Almost all of the institutions of the region (and the nation) respected and supported this unabashedly-Christian orientation of the society. Government, the schools, business, the newspapers, network radio, the movies--all publicly supported the mainstream Christian beliefs and values.

Most small-town Southerners attended Sunday school and/or church on Sundays. Businesses were closed on Sunday; and there weren't many forms of public entertainment then; so for most people, life slowed down a lot on Sunday, reminding everyone that this was the Lord's day.

But there were also constant reminders during the week that this was a Christian society, too; at all appropriate public gatherings, there would be public prayers--at ball games, special school events, service-club meetings, etc.; and even in the media there were frequent references to our Christianity. For example, Roy Rogers would close his weekly half-hour network-radio show by saying, "Goodbye, good luck, and may the Good Lord take a likin' to you."

We were constantly reminded that we should live our daily lives as Christians; and although we were just ordinary mortals, most of us tried to do that. Our Christian beliefs shaped the rest of our institutions, and our unwritten social-code.

Each Southern town had a few grimly-defiant atheists, but they were out of the mainstream. The Southern-Protestant beliefs shared by the majority of us gave the Southerners of the 1940s so many beliefs and values in common that we were a close-knit society. Accordingly, each of us felt a powerful sense of belonging to the community, and that was a source of great satisfaction.

PERSONAL HONOR

In the 1940s, most Southerners believed that a man should be scrupulously honest and straightforward in his dealings with others, and that he should always be prepared to defend what was his--whether that was his family, his property, or his good name. People were held personally responsible for the consequences of their acts. They didn't go to the police much in those days, or sue one another very often. A man's word was his bond--unless he proved otherwise; and people routinely did business on a handshake. Honest people generally didn't associate with crooks and other lowlifes.

What this meant was that most Southerners valued very highly the fact that they were Southerners, who lived by the mutually-agreed code; and they were prepared to trust their fellow men unless specifically given a reason not to. This resulted in great peace of mind for most people, even when times were hard.

GENDER

In the 1940s, the roles of men and women--which had been worked out by trial and error over the centuries--were clearly and sharply divided, and understood by all. Man brought home the bacon; woman kept the house and primarily raised the children. Men were expected to be masculine in nature; women were expected to be feminine. In the South there was no such acceptable category as "sensitive" men or "metrosexuals." Men were the managers, or did the heavy lifting and the dangerous jobs; and women who worked were generally secretaries, nurses, librarians, schoolteachers, etc. Women did not serve as police officers, firefighters, infantrymen, combat pilots, etc. (During WWII, because of manpower shortages, women of necessity did perform men's jobs in the defense industries, and did serve in support roles in the US military--including the ferrying of aircraft; but with the end of the war, those jobs came to an abrupt end in the South.)

Most Southerners were completely comfortable in their traditionally-assigned gender roles; so there was no societal conflict over how masculine the men should be or how feminine the women should be. Peace reigned within the society.

FAMILY

The Southerners of the 1940s believed that the primary duty of all parents was to raise their children right; therefore, the stability of the society rested squarely upon the family, which in turn rested squarely upon the institution of marriage. Every mother with children was expected to have a husband living with her and supporting the family and helping to raise the children. Hopefully, they would be happily married; but if not, it was still expected that they be married: the Southerners believed that the needs of the children and of the society demanded that. Thus, the laws and the social code were laid out to get as many of the couples married as possible. Those rules were: no sex before marriage; and abortions were almost impossible to get. Thus, naturally-oversexed teenagers knew that there was no safety net to catch them should they slip up; so they had to be very careful about what they did, and with whom. Also, it was extremely difficult to get a divorce; so people planning to get married had to think carefully about whether they were matched up with the right person for the long haul. A man and woman living together without benefit of a marriage license were social pariahs in the eyes of the community.

The result was very few illegitimate births and single-parent families in the South of the 1940s. The system was very hard on some of the young adults, but it was wonderful for most of the children.

The first priority of each married couple was to raise their children right; so whenever possible, Mama stayed home to cook the meals, keep up the house, and raise the children and teach them moral values. The family spent a lot of time together, and at least ate breakfast and dinner together every day. There was no such thing as "quality time."

The children had a stable life, because they generally reached adulthood with the same set of parents they had started out with. When children misbehaved, often they were whipped; so they grew up in a disciplined environment. They knew exactly what the rules were, and what would happen to them if they broke those rules. But because they spent so much time with their parents, most of them were confronted with overwhelming evidence that their parents loved them and wanted them to succeed in life. That kind of upbringing gave the children confidence in themselves and their surroundings, and taught them that the world is a good place. No child could be given any gift more precious than that; it was the keystone of the success of the South as the decent society.

Money was still tight in much of the South during most of the 1940s, so most children did not get lavish toys on their birthdays or at Christmas. That didn't matter. They would rustle up old cardboard boxes that appliances had been shipped in, and pretend that those were forts. And in his time off, Daddy would teach the boys how to hunt and fish and throw a ball.

The children were expected to respect all adults, and to do whatever the adults told them to, because the adults were usually responsible people with far more experience of life than the children. The children had no rights of their own, because they were immature dependents who were not expected to take care of themselves. But by and large, the society was run so as to put the needs of the children first. For the most part, that approach worked very well.

The family was the cornerstone of the traditional Southern society. The children--having been raised and cared for by their parents--in return were expected to care for their parents when they grew old and were unable to care for themselves. Most were willing to do so. Consequently there were very few nursing homes in the 1940s.

Usually each family had only one car, so townspeople routinely walked to work, children walked to school, etc. There were always a lot of people on the sidewalks; and they always greeted each other. Where I lived, the school buses wouldn't pick up any children closer than 2 miles from school. The South of the 1940s had very few fat children or adults.

Because Southern life in the 1940s revolved around the family, most children were taught to respect and live by the core beliefs and values of the region, the community, and the family. And although times might have been hard, and higher education difficult to come by, those children received the best-possible training for living useful lives which would give them great satisfaction.

EDUCATION

The all-white Southern schools that I attended in the 1940s didn't have any money to spare. The grammar school in one town had burned down, and WWII was going on, and they couldn't really afford to rebuild it, and the construction materials weren't available then anyway; so I attended school in a church, in city hall, in the jailhouse, etc. My high-school building had been condemned for 10 or 15 years. I never attended a school that had a lunchroom; we always went home for lunch or brown-bagged it. But none of that was of any importance; we had good teachers, and the only job of the schools back then was to educate the educable children; so I received a much better education than most of the children attending school today.

Because one of the top priorities in the South of the 1940s was to raise the children right, both the parents and the teachers placed great emphasis upon a good education for the children.

Most of the Southern schools of the 1940s were still run on conservative principles; and they taught their subjects in depth, using the traditional teaching-methods. The high schools taught math through plane geometry, biology and chemistry and physics, four years of English and literature, at least two years of a foreign language, civics, world history, American history (emphasizing Southern history), and world geography. This subject-mix gave the student at least a good start at constructing a worldview from which to make sense out of the world around him (and that was probably the only real structured-opportunity he would ever have to form one).

Back then our schools used very few true-false or multiple-guess tests; most of our tests required that we supply the specific answer, and enough essay-type tests were thrown in to determine whether or not the student could communicate a coherent set of thoughts. If a student failed a course, he had to take it over again; if he failed several courses, he was held back and stayed in the same grade the next year; and that was a powerful incentive for us to study and pass our courses. In addition, those who hoped to attend college knew they would have to earn good grades in order to get admitted into a college (about 10% of the graduates attended college back then). But equally (or more) important, those who expected to go to work right after graduating from high school knew that their prospective employers would study their high-school transcripts very carefully--including their grades in deportment; and that their grades would often make the difference as to whether they could get the jobs they wanted. The whole society took education very seriously. The drop-out rate was very low, and the schools graduated few if any functional illiterates. (The drop-out rate in my home town is now horrendous; and about a third of the high-school graduates from the schools in my area today cannot read, write, and do simple math well enough to get a job working on a production line in the nearby manufacturing-companies.)

Southern schools of the 1940s instilled discipline. The philosophy was that the schools existed to educate the educable children; so the disruptive ones were kicked out--and then became somebody else's problem. The parents expected the schools to discipline the students, and this included paddling; and a student who got paddled at school usually got a worse whipping when he got home. The system worked extremely well. The principal and teachers ran the school, and nobody questioned that. We had very peaceful schools. (My high school graduating-class in 1951 contained 118 people; and as far as we can determine, until now, none of those people has ever spent any time in prison.)

Our schools had truant officers, who regularly checked the pool halls and other favorite hangouts for children who had skipped school, so the (successful) rate of skipping school was very, very low.

The Southern schools of the 1940s were segregated; I attended all-white schools. Because there were no racial issues to deal with, the schools had only to educate the students, so there were no fluff courses, social promotions, or any of that poison.

If I could relive my childhood, and choose between receiving the bare-bones education that I got in the 1940s, or the best public-school education that the South offers today, I'd take the education that I received back then--without a moment's hesitation.

ENTERTAINMENT

In the Southern towns of the 1940s there were three main forms of mass entertainment: the newspapers, radio, and the movies. The South already had a few liberal newspapers by then, which were contentious and sharply-critical of our traditional way of life (the Atlanta Constitution was the one in my area). The liberals read those newspapers; the vast majority of traditional Southerners did not. The conservative newspapers approved of us mainstream Southerners, and our majority beliefs, and our way of life. So we were soothed--not hammered--about the way we lived and thought when we read our papers. But all of the newspapers had strict rules about not printing profanity or content of a sexual nature.

Radio was the television of the 1940s. There were three national radio-networks then: NBC, CBS, and Mutual (which later became ABC). The network programming (soap operas, comedies, dramas, variety shows, concerts, news) was broadcast by regional stations in the cities; the local stations played records and broadcast the local news. All were subject to stringent regulation by the FCC: no profanity, sexual situations, risque jokes, etc., and crime could not pay, either; so children could safely be left alone with the radio playing. Those shows which dealt with Southern topics were supportive (or at least respectful) of the traditional Southern viewpoints and lifestyle. The radio stations usually signed off at midnight (often by playing "Dixie").

Most small-town children of the 1940s could not afford to go see more than one movie per week (and some could not afford that--even at 9 cents if you were age 12 or younger); so the movies were a big treat for us; and we watched them with big round eyes. However, the Hollywood Production Code eliminated all but the rare profane word, and even any halfway-explicit sexual situations; and crime did not pay in the movies either. In the 1940s, Southern history, the Southerners, and the Southern way of life were generally treated with respect in the movies.

The mass entertainment of the 1940s generally promoted a moral way of life; and was produced with the children clearly in mind; and was respectful of the South and Southerners. Our entertainment built us up in our own eyes as Southerners--it did not tear us down. And although to today's Southerners this description may sound tame and boring, in fact those restrictions of decency challenged the writers and producers and actors of that day to do much better work than they do now. For example, the era of the late 1930s and the 1940s is considered by the movie critics to have been the Golden Age of Hollywood.

In the 1940s, the available mass-entertainment contributed powerfully to the homogeneity and tranquility of the Southerners.

WORK

Within the towns at least, the South of the 1940s made no pretense of being a classless society--as the North had always done. We had a well-defined tiered society, beginning with the textile-mill owner at the top of the scale, and the town drunk at the bottom. Everybody knew exactly where each person fit in between. Although this probably sounds horrible to young adults of today, in practice it worked very well back then. What made it work was that in those days in the South, the individual was not judged solely by his bank account and his material possessions; he was judged just as carefully by his nature and his character; and the way he did his job; and the way he fit into the society. So whether a man were a banker or a janitor, he was respected by the entire society if he lived his life in such a way as to earn their respect. And you'll still see that same kind of respect among the old people in the Southern towns. So it was not so much the kind of work you did, but the way you did it, that really counted in the eyes of the community.

Southerners of that day realized that their work constituted an important part of their lives; and most of them (though certainly not all) took pride in delivering a dollar's worth of work for a dollar's pay. That viewpoint gave them a degree of self confidence that nothing else could have. In the cotton mills that were at least halfway-decently managed, the mill hands felt loyalty toward the boss; and the boss felt loyalty toward the workers: they were all in it together.

Most retail businesses were customer-oriented. The storekeeper appreciated his customers' patronage, and did everything he could to keep those customers coming back. And by mutual agreement, the Southerners also viewed their daily business-transactions as important social-transactions, which--if conducted pleasantly--could make their lives a lot more enjoyable. And so in the stores of the small towns in the 1940s, the customers visited with each other and the storekeeper while doing business.

People didn't throw away their products when they broke. Instead, there were lots of repair shops in the towns--for shoes, clothing, small appliances, etc., where you could get a broken product fixed cheap. The South of that era was definitely a people-oriented service society. Doctors routinely made house calls to visit their sick patients. The milkman delivered your quart(s) of milk every morning. Even lower-middle-class families could afford to have maids. For most of the 1940s, whenever you made a phone call, you asked the operator to ring the number. And if you needed to do business with a company by phone, you always got a human being on the other end of the line, who generally found a way to solve your problem.

Because of the way business in the South was structured in the 1940s, the people living in the towns had far more contact with one another in their daily routines than they do today. So whether or not you consciously went around socializing, you could not feel--or be--isolated in a Southern town of the 1940s, unless you deliberately chose to become a pariah; otherwise, you were tightly plugged into the surrounding society. This made life much richer and far more satisfying.

RACE RELATIONS

In the 1940s, few blacks lived in the mountainous parts of the South--where it was very hard to earn a living, but vast numbers of blacks lived everywhere else. The South was racially segregated then; nevertheless, most of the whites living on the farms and in the towns of the flatlands and the foothills were thrown into close contact with the blacks; but many of the whites living in the big cities of the South had little contact with blacks.

The white society was unquestionably the dominant one. There was little direct competition between the two races in the South, because the blacks did the heavy lifting and the menial jobs that most whites didn't want to do. The Southern whites had officially segregated the blacks around the turn of the 20th century, primarily because the Northern capitalists' harsh financial-policies towards the South had forced huge numbers of black sharecroppers, renters, and farmers off the farms--and out of the only way of life they had ever known in the US. They had gravitated to the nearby towns and cities, but they simply did not know how to live in that kind of society; and their crime rates had swiftly shot up to insupportable percentages. So in self-defense, the whites had distanced themselves from the blacks via segregation. But by the 1940s, the blacks had learned to function much better in the carefully-controlled environment of Southern towns and cities; so it was then about time for segregation to be ended--albeit very, very gradually and carefully.

The white Southerners of the 1940s who had constant contact with the blacks understood from firsthand experience that there were great differences between the two races: the living conditions in sub-Saharan Africa had required very different capabilities and had permitted very different limitations than the living conditions in Western Europe--whence came the predominant whites in the US. And although there was no question in the whites' minds that they had been far-better equipped by centuries of heredity to function in the dominant role in the South of the 1940s than had the blacks, nevertheless, the whites believed that most of the blacks had a number of attractive qualities; and they liked those blacks for those qualities. At the same time, the blacks realized that they were not in a position to challenge the whites for the leadership position in the South; so there was very little daily friction between the races in the parts of the South where the blacks were populous. Life generally ran smoothly.

As a group, the white Northerners insisted upon viewing the black race as their precise equals in all matters; but they wanted to have as little as possible to do with individual blacks. By contrast, the white Southerners never pretended that the two races were equal; but most of the white Southerners who frequently came into contact with blacks became friends with a number of them.

As the 1940s rolled by, the Northern and Scalawag liberals began to campaign to end segregation in the South swiftly--and without any of the carefully-planned societal-controls that the Southern leaders realized would be vitally important; so it was becoming ominously clear to the white Southerners that these increasingly-strident-demands were motivated more by hatred of the traditional white South than by any real concern for the welfare of the blacks; but throughout the 1940s this campaign continued to be mostly a series of rumbling thunderclaps on the distant horizon--unless you were then reading a liberal newspaper.

THE COMMUNITY

The South of the 1940s was a Christian society, thus--basically--a law-abiding society, because that is what it wanted to be. Consequently, in most Southern towns, the crime rate was very low. In most towns and cities, people could walk almost anywhere they wanted to, at any hour of the day or night, without fear of harm. The children could run free in the neighborhood, without fear of harm. My parents--both of whom were from Macon, Georgia--had worked in New York City for seven years during the Great Depression, so they understood about evil; yet they had no qualms about sending me off to Atlanta 40 miles away every Saturday morning by myself on the bus at 6:00 AM when I was 13, to visit the dentist, and then allowing me to wander the magic streets of downtown Atlanta until late that afternoon--when it was time to come home again.

In those days before air conditioning, everyone in our town had screen doors, and screens on the windows of their houses, and they would leave all their windows and outside doors open at night to cool down the house. Those who were lucky enough to take a vacation in Florida during the summer would always have to search the house to find the front-door key, so they could lock up the house while they were gone. Otherwise, they never locked the house. Nor did anybody lock up their cars. They didn't need to. The South of the 1940s was a safe place to live; and this gave all of us tremendous peace of mind.

The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were seen as among the most-valuable outside tools for helping to raise the children right; so most of the churches in the towns that I lived in sponsored Boy Scout and Girl Scout packs, and Cub Scout dens. I learned a great deal as a Scout in the 1940s. It is almost inconceivable to me today that Southern businesses refuse to sponsor them or donate to them because they screen out homosexuals as Scout leaders or Scout members. That tells me more than anything else just how much the South has lost since the 1940s.

The South of the 1940s was gun-oriented. Almost all of the boys whom I knew in school had .22 rifles to hunt with, and most could use their fathers' shotguns to hunt birds.

I spent some years in the US military and as a civilian working at far-flung missile-test ranges, etc. The majority of my fellows and coworkers there were also Southerners. These were coarse, rough societies consisting of some of the most-profane men on earth; and I am sorry to admit that I was just as profane as the rest of them--and perhaps more than most. Yet as Southerners of the 1940s, we had been taught never to use profanity or deliberate coarseness in front of a woman, or in polite society, or via the printed word or any other form of mass communications. We believed that the South was truly the decent society--and that we must do our best to keep it so. And that was what every other Southerner with any kind of upbringing also believed.

Because the traditional South of the 1940s refused to be bullied by civil-rights activists, feminists, environmentalists, animal-rights activists, or any of the myriad other liberal groups that are now successfully balkanizing the nation, the Southerners of that day felt perfectly free to express our real views to one another in public, without ever lowering our voices or looking around furtively to learn who might be listening to our conversation. We had sharply-held convictions and clear consciences. We would not tolerate political correctness or multiculturalism; we were a tight-knit society with commonly-held beliefs and mutually-held goals. Those Southerners had not yet been guilt-tripped and brainwashed to hate ourselves and our convictions, by the propaganda campaigns of the liberal media, schools, and government. Therefore, our lives were a hundred times more enjoyable than those of the Southerners of today.

OUR BASIC PHILOSOPHY

The US had just been through the Great Depression and then experienced WWII; and the majority of 1940s Southerners believed in God, and believed that He would give us the strength to endure the really hard parts of life; and that with His help, we sinners might live halfway-decent lives. Most of us held the following priorities: our relationship with God; personal honor; family; community; and then everything else--in that order.

As a group, we believed that man is a flawed being: he is capable of managing his own affairs much better than any government can manage them for him; but he is unable to govern his fellow man very well at all, because power always corrupts. For both of those reasons, we believed in minimal government; and we much preferred to be governed under the terms of the US Constitution--with the local government (which we could control) having the most power, and the federal government (which we ourselves could not control) having the least. We believed that government should serve the people--and not the other way around; and we understood clearly that in all circumstances, government is a very dangerous servant.

As a society we loved stability, and therefore we treasured tradition--carefully preserving all of the social institutions which had proven their value over time, instead of ceaselessly scrapping what we had and experimenting with new ones, as the Yankees did.

We Southerners demonstrated by the way we lived our lives that we were not primarily a money-oriented society; we put family and community ahead of money and material possessions--to a greater extent than any other region of the country; and that was probably the one factor that differentiated the Southerners most-sharply from everybody else in the nation.

Above all else, the Old South valued family, friends, and neighbors. It created a society in which very few would become rich, but in which most people could live sane, stable, peaceful, tranquil lives, rich in friendships and the other elements of life which are deeply satisfying. The Old South of the 1940s was still the decent society.

CONCLUSION

I have probably left out a number of important elements; but the above should provide a fair idea of what the South of the 1940s--still the Old South--was all about. It bore little relation to the mainstream South of today, which substitutes moneymaking and consumerism--material possessions and commercial entertainments--for the people-oriented values of the past. The big trouble with today's South (like today's North) is that beyond a certain point, the material possessions and commercial entertainments don't deliver what they promised; they are not truly satisfying; they leave us hollow and empty and lonely and deeply frustrated.

The South of the 1940s was much closer to the South of the Confederacy than it is to the South of today. I can well understand why the Confederates were willing to fight to the death to defend the beliefs and values of the Old South: they knew how unique and valuable their society was. I can also understand why the Southerners of today are not willing to life one finger to defend the sorry mess of a Yankeeized society that they have now.

My guess is that if the Southerners of today truly understood what a wonderful kind of life the Southerners of the Old South lived, they would be willing to go to a great deal of trouble to readopt those old beliefs and values--minus segregation, whose time has passed. I wish that the SCV members would take the trouble to learn what their Confederate heritage really is, and then teach it to their fellow Southerners. We would all be a lot better off then.