If you want to know about our country's long history of segregation, look up the word “Southland.” Many Californians are not familiar with how the greater LA region is located by the nickname often associated with the Old South. The story of this strange encounter gives context to today's problems, because it is about the regional and political conflicts of America and how one businessman takes advantage of the opportunities he has.
The Southeastern United States has been widely known as the “Southland” since 1861, when the Confederacy was formed. Before the first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter, a poem entitled “Southland Fears and Foeman” was published in Richmond's “Southern Literary Messenger.” From there, the Society's verse praising “the land of the South” flowed freely.
The unions responded with their verses. Augustine Duganne, a New York legislator, soldier and poet, asked in an 1863 poem: “For what has all this Southland been / But one white tomb of sin / spotless—so evil within?”
The Civil War ended in 1865, but the nickname and its connection to the Confederacy endured. In 1878, the poem “Southland” delivered at a meeting of the Mississippi Press Assn. it caused a firestorm. The author, Will Kernan, was a known extremist who wrote the deeply corrupt “Hate Song”. Although Kernan edited Mississippi's Southern States newspaper, he was from Ohio, because then, as now, American segregation transcended state boundaries. In “Southland,” Kernan attacked the 14th and 15th Amendments, which granted citizenship rights to black Americans and voting rights to Black men: “Let the blessing of the Caucasian vote be controlled.”
Iowa's Le Mars Sentinel hit back with a parody of Kernan's work: “Ho Southland / Sunny Southland /… A land of different breeds, different breeds, bastards, hybrids, Hottentots, brigades, savages / Green-boned traitors and she-devils….” The Sentinel's “Southland” was widely reprinted, much to the chagrin of Southerners. In 1880, Mississippi's Meridian Mercury called for an end to all collaboration with the North: “Above all, love your sunny Southern country… Avoid all petty hypocrisy in favor of the whole country.” The New York Times reprinted, and repudiated, Mercury's diatribe.
As newspapers across the country used the term “Southland” in rhetoric, Harrison Gray Otis, editor of the new Los Angeles Daily Times, began to do the same. California had its own north/south rivalry, and Otis hated seeing Northern Californians see “cow country” south of the Tehachapi Mountains. He used the Times to fight back, posting poems like Edward Vincent's “Southern California”: “Time, place, opportunity, profit are yours/ O beautiful southwest.” Otis rejected San Francisco's sleight of hand the same way Lynyrd Skynyrd responded on “Sweet Home Alabama” to Neil Young's anti-Southern insults: with songs that “sing about the Southland.”
Otis wasn't the first person to call LA the Southland, but he was the loudest, coining the name with his own powerful advocacy. In the boom/bust year of 1887, when the San Jose Mercury News encouraged central California to attract tourists from the “crowded South,” Otis accused the “disaffected North” of “partial jealousy,” criticizing its plans as opposed to “this good and evil. sunny in the south.”
Here, “southern land” refers to geography. But one month later the Times accused “all Northern California” of conspiring against “the South and the country,” sending ambassadors to “explore the country and send a soft foot north.” In this case, “Southland” represents a new region. As one writer ofThe Times explained: “We have learned much about the New South, referring to the Southern states of our Union. California has the New South, and the whole world is beginning to know about it.” Increasingly, California's New South embraces connections with the old.
On the one hand this seemed appropriate, as early LA was full of Southern transplants who supported the Confederacy. “Let it never be forgotten,” declared the San Francisco Bulletin in 1862, “that the county of Los Angeles, in this critical day of the Republic, is divided into Dixie and Disunion.” But Otis was not from the South. He was a Union veteran from Ohio who had fought at Antietam.
When Otis developed the Southland of California, he was not showing the pride of a regional man – he was creating a new rule. He had spent his glory days conquering the old Southland, and repeated that conquest on the West Coast. “General Otis” borrowed from military lore to call his LA mansion “the Bivouac” and his Times staff “the phalanx” as he built, and lorded over, the new Southland.
Unfortunately, Otis' new regime repeated the worst of the old: It grew into another white oligarchy where the rich got richer and the working class suffered. Otis made his fortune in real estate speculation while his rampant union attacks led to the bombing of The Times in 1910 in which 21 people died.
It may take another century for LA to build a better Southland. That work, in California and America, is not finished.
Laura Brodie is a professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Her books include “Breaking Out: VMI and the Coming of Women.”
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