Anything Is Nice

In October 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the executive mansion. This was an unprecedented move. No African-American had ever been asked to dine with the president, and while neither Roosevelt or his staff said much of the event, it was surely done in the spirit of reconciliation and Roosevelt’s desire to be “the people’s president.” Reaction to the visit was mixed. The pro-Republican press tended to support Roosevelt’s unexpected gesture while Democratic organs, North and South, either questioned Roosevelt’s intentions or denounced the meeting altogether.

Historians have mostly focused on the Southern response to the event, primarily “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman’s vicious statements condemning the dinner as a slippery slope toward the creation and acceptance of a “mongrel race.” But less than one month later, William Jennings Bryan dedicated nearly three pages of his personal newspaper The Commoner to what one Southern paper called the “peculiar” interview. Bryan was no race baiter. He showed sympathy toward African-Americans and argued that they were as capable of “self-government” as any member of white American society, yet he also believed in the status quo in regard to race relations. Bryan wrote that he:

…hoped that both of them will upon reflection realize the wisdom of abandoning their purpose to wipe out race lines, if they entertain such a purpose. Prof. Washington’s work as an educator will be greatly impaired if he allows it to be understood that his object is to initiate the members of his race into the social circles of the whites, and he will do injustice to those of his own color if he turns their thoughts away from intellectual and moral development to the less substantial advantages if there are any advantages at all to be derived from social equality.

This was the widely held sentiment of the majority of Americans in 1901, North and South, even by those who, unlike Tillman, saw value in Washington’s work and purpose at the Tuskegee Institute and supported his charge to “cast down your buckets where you are.” Washington personified reconciliation, the key to understanding both Northern opposition to Mr. Lincoln’s War paradoxically encouragement for Lincoln’s “with malice toward none” approach to “reconstruction” rather than the “recreation” of the United States.

Reconciliation began before the War ended in 1865 and continued unabated well into the late twentieth century. Northern Democrats and conservative Republicans favored “resumption” of the Union once hostilities ceased and sought reintegration of the South into all aspects of the United States as quickly as possible. Roosevelt himself was part of this policy, as was his predecessor William McKinley. Long before Richard Nixon made the phrase “Southern strategy” popular, William McKinley toured the South as president, even standing for Dixie while it was played in Atlanta, and in his first inaugural in 1897 insisted that “The North and South no longer divide on the old lines, but on principles and policies; and in this fact surely lover of the country can find cause for true felicity.” Roosevelt admired the “unreconstructed” views of his Georgia born mother and ordered all confiscated Confederate flags be returned to their Southern homes in 1905. Every president from McKinley in 1896 to Bill Clinton in 1996 courted the South and used Confederate imagery to do so. The South was not some alien section of “deplorables” to be castigated but a valuable and manifestly integral part of the American experience.

Music echoed this sentiment, and as virtually every distinctively American form of music originated in the South, it became the most enduring and conspicuous example of “reconciliation.” Southern music is provincial, a reflection of the culture that produced it, and every Southern State has a song dedicated to it in popular culture. The lyrical content of much of postbellum Southern music–regardless of form, style, or genre–can be divided into two categories: affirmation and defiance. Love and respect for people, place, and family underpin both descriptions, and Northerners quickly adopted an affirmationist version of the South through music. Many of these tunes were written and performed by Northerners themselves.

These songs tended to incorporate a superficial understanding of Southern society, but nevertheless portrayed the South and its people in a positive light. The most popular singer in America during the 1910s, Billy Murray of Colorado, often belted pro-Southern songs into gramophone recordings. “Anything Is Nice If It Comes From Dixieland” and “Are You From Dixie (‘Cause I’m From Dixie, Too)” were popular tunes in the World War I era. Sunny weather, warm people, good food, beautiful women, and a slow pace were common themes in these Southern themed songs. “Are You From Dixie” was penned by a Polish Jew and a native New Yorker:

Hello, there, stranger! how do you do?
There’s something I’d like to say to you
Don’t be surprised
You’re recognized!
I’m no detective but I’ve just surmised.
You’re from the place where I long to be,
Your smiling face seems to say to me,
You’re from my own land,
My sunny homeland,
Tell me can it be?
It was a way back in eighty nine,
I crossed the old Mason Dixon line
Gee! but I’ve yearned,
Longed to return
To all the good old pals I left behind.
My home is way down in Alabam’
On a plantation near Birmingham,
And one thing’s certain,
I’m surely flirtin’
With those southbound trains:
Are you from Dixie?
I said from Dixie!
Where the fields of cotton beckon to me.
I’m glad to see you,
Tell me how be you
And the friends I’m longing to see.
If you’re from Alabama, Tennessee or Caroline
Any place below the Mason Dixon line
Then you’re from Dixie,
Hurrary for Dixie!
‘Cause I’m from Dixie too!

No one considered the theme or lyrics to be insensitive or odd in 1919. Jerry Reed recorded a slightly different version in 1969 where it became one of his biggest hits. The highest paid radio act in 1928, New York’s “Happiness Boys,” often sang Southern themed songs, with “I Would Rather Be Alone In The South” one of their most recognized tunes. Anything was better than being in New York, but the South, with its climate, women, and food, represented a marked influence over anywhere else in America.

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