For God, Family and Republic

The Abbeville Institute
At the behest of one H. Lee Cheek, Jr., I got a scholarship to attend the Abbeville Institute this past July 2005. How did that happen? My Amazon Top 500 book reviews on the Internet captured his eyes, and he gave generously me an autographed anthology of the southern statesman John C. Calhoun’s writings last fall 2004. I’ve found that Cheek is an upstanding guy having dialogued with him on occasion. He is a Calhoun scholar, a champion of southern conservatism, a political science professor and a Methodist preacher to boot… (Being a Bible preacher and a college professor, who else wants to do that? We have a lot in common.) Well, I gave him a flattering but well-deserved book review of one his other books, Calhoun and Popular Rule. A few months later he unexpectedly recommends me for a near-one-thousand dollar scholarship (with room, board and meals) to attend an Abbeville Institute. The Institute had a colloquium series at the Young-Sanders Civil War Center on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana in St. Mary’s Parish just south of New Orleans. Well, he figured the Institute’s discussions would interest me and figured right.

After doing my homework on the Abbeville Institute, I realized that it was right up my alley. I had to go! All my meals were paid for, and my hotel, and I got to meet with some renowned scholars and authors who all support the southern tradition. For someone that was fined and repimanded for refusing to take down his Confederate flag from his dorm window in undergrad, I figured this was right up my alley!

Onward to the Cajun Coast of Louisiana
After a thirteen-hour drive down to bayou country with a VCU history student, I arrived for an enlightening educational seminar spanning a week and including a weekend. I had nice hotel accommodations. On the way down, I detoured through the French Quarter in New Orleans, which was full of charming waterfront houses and stores with an Acadian architectural charm. Anyway, parts of New Orleans were not that beautiful, the roads were terrible, and the city was riddled with open sewer ditches. Plus, you wouldn’t want to be caught dead on those streets at night least you meet your fate in some bizarre voodoo ritual.

Concern for personal safety and automotive alignment didn’t end after leaving the New Orleans… Making haste across this bizarre contraption known as the Huey Long bridge to cross the Mississippi, I was jubilant. The bridge was as almost as crooked as the real Huey Long and it strangely crossed the river in a semicircle fashion, and at a pitched 30˚ angle up and then back down again. Railroad tracks hovered above. The lanes were not even wide enough. It yielded a deafening sound of clanking metal as brave vehicles ventured over it. Afterwards, I could think of no better name-bearer for that Louisianan monstrosity of engineering lunacy than the so called Kingfish—Senator Huey Long. He was the new breed of politicians representing the worst of the gaudy New South espousing socialist demagoguery while being in the pawn of mobsters, gamblers and organized crime.

Our final destination was Franklin, Louisiana (Google map) which was a tranquil little town off the beaten path and surrounded by mangrove swamps and huddled against the banks of a lazy gator-filled bayou river—the Teche. Franklin was full of beautiful architecture and plantation homes (well the homes that didn’t meet the Yankee torch during the war.) Every now and then one could run into French-speaking Acadians or people with that distinctive bayou Cajun accent. It was also full of slot machines and two-bit casinos, as gambling is legal in Louisiana… but I didn’t spend a single dime on gambling! The weather was beautiful and it only rained when we drove through Atlanta going down. I heard everyone else back at home was lamenting the imminence of tornadoes while my mother needlessly worried a hurricane was going to hit me.

Ironically, just prior to the Abbeville Institute’s July event Time Magazine ran a special article entitled Loathing Lincoln as part of its July, 4 issue with Lincoln on the cover. Of course, Time mentions the Abbeville Institute which hosted the July 2005 colloquium that I attended, and the Clyde Wilson and other faculty are cynically described as “a small, scrappy band…” Time’s Jeff Chu declares:

Wilson and the rest of a small, scrappy band of like-minded professors see themselves as intellectual warriors. They teach history—and philosophy, religion and politics—from what they call the "Southern tradition," at top universities like Emory and the University of Virginia as well as at seminars held by groups like the Abbeville Institute.

The Abbeville Institute
Needless to say, the Time article is a very condescending hatchet job full of selective quotations and unflattering adjectives. But hey it’s Time Magazine… Hitler and Stalin were once their man of the year, and that sort of journalism is to be expected. Likewise, it has assembled a multitude of accomplished scholars among its faculty. Many of the scholars are published, and many of which I was quite familiar with through their various books and online Internet columns.

The Abbeville Institute gave us this statement about the Institute and their agenda.

What the Institute Is. The Abbeville Institute is an association of scholars in higher education devoted to a critical study of what is true and valuable in the Southern tradition. The Institute conducts seminars and conferences for college and graduate students, and guides research and publication on all aspects of the Southern tradition. The Institute is not a Southern heritage preservation society, nor is it concerned merely with the history of the region. Its work is more philosophic in nature, namely to explore the metaphysical image of things human and divine to which the Southern tradition bears witness. This includes seeking to understand the value of those features of community that promote an enduring and humane order: the importance of private property, place, piety, humility, manners, classical liberal studies, rhetoric, and the importance of a human scale to political order. We are interested both in what those values intimate for our own time, and in how they
came to be features of the Southern tradition.

Why the Institute was Founded. In a healthy society, education is the thoughtful enjoyment of a cultural inheritance. But American society today is in the grip of an ideological culture war. During the last thirty years, colleges and universities have come to be dominated by the ideologies of multiculturalism and political correctness. The result is that the distinctly Southern interpretation of American history and identity is simply not taught. If the Southern tradition is mentioned at all, it is usually vilified as little more than a mask for racism. In ignoring or eliminating the Southern tradition, much that is good and noble in American life is rendered inexplicable; but perhaps more importantly one erases from memory a valuable intellectual and spiritual resource for exposing and correcting the errors of American modernity. Eugene Genovese, a distinguished historian of the South--a northerner and a man of the left--has been a rare voice in criticizing this purge of the Southern tradition from the academy. In the Massey Lectures given at Harvard, he had this to say: "Rarely these days, even on southern campuses, is it possible to acknowledge the achievements of the white people of the South...To speak positively about any part of this southern tradition is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity--an increasingly successful campaign by the media and an academic elite to strip young white southerners, and arguably black southerners as well, of their heritage, and, therefore, their identity. They are being taught to forget their forebears or to remember them with shame."

The Goals of the Institute. This condition is not going to change overnight. Those who created it are tenured, and will dominate in higher education for at least a generation—and even longer since they are disposed to hire and tenure only their own. Even so, there are many scholars in America and abroad who take inspiration from the Southern tradition, and many others who are open to what it has to teach. Students too are open. Many feel they are somehow encountering on campus a profound intellectual and spiritual disorder, but they do not know how to think about it.

What is needed is an association of faculty and students outside the university—but connected to it—where new questions can be raised and new lines of research explored. Students who attend Institute events discover faculty with national and international reputations who have a different, and more thoughtful conception of the Southern tradition and of its place in the increasingly contested question of American identity. Armed with scholarly understanding and the lineaments of a different program of research, students return to the university better able to engage in fruitful debate with their teachers and fellow students.

In addition to education, the Institute provides a circle of fellowship for students and faculty. We keep in touch with students, providing academic support, and advising them about programs of study, graduate schools, scholarships, fellowships, and grants. After graduation from their respective colleges or universities, we provide assistance in getting them placed in teaching, research, or other professional positions.