If you're curious about our country's long history of polarization, look at the term “Southland.” Most Californians are unaware of exactly how the Los Angeles region ended up with a nickname more commonly associated with the Old South. The story behind this strange juxtaposition provides context for current crises, because it deals with regional and political conflicts in the United States and how an opportunistic businessman profited from them.
The southeastern United States became widely known as the “Southern Land” beginning in 1861, when the Confederacy was formed. Before the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, a poem titled “The Southland Fears no Foeman” was published in Richmond's “Southern Literary Messenger.” From there, Confederate verses praising “the Southland” flowed freely.
The unionists responded with their own verses. Augustine Duganne, New York legislator, soldier, and poet, asked in an 1863 poem, “What has all this southern country been / but a white sepulcher of sin / so beautiful without, so disgusting within?”
The Civil War ended in 1865, but the nickname and its association with the Confederacy endured. In 1878, a “Southland” poem recited at the Mississippi Press Association convention caused a storm. The author, Will Kernan, was a known extremist who wrote the deeply misanthropic “Hate Song.” Although Kernan edited the Southern States newspaper in Mississippi, he was from Ohio, because then, as now, the polarization of the United States transcended regional borders. In “Southland,” Kernan attacked the 14th and 15th Amendments, which respectively granted citizenship rights to black Americans and voting rights to black men: “Let the blessing of the vote by the Caucasians be controlled.”
Iowa's Le Mars Sentinel responded with a parody of Kernan's work: “Ho Southland / Sunny Southland /…Land of mongrels, crossbreeds, bastards, hybrids, Hottentots, bandits, savages / Of raw-boned traitors and skinny she-devils…” The Sentinel's “Southland” was widely reprinted, infuriating southerners. In 1880, the Mississippi Southern Meridian called for an end to all cooperation with the North: “Above all, love your own sunny Southern Land…Avoid all slimy hypocrisy about loving the whole country.” The New York Times reprinted and condemned Mercurio's tirade.
As journalists across the country brandished “Southland” in rhetorical fights, Harrison Gray Otis, editor of the new Los Angeles Daily Times, began doing the same. California had its own north/south rivalry, and Otis resented northern Californians' smug perception of the “cow counties” south of the Tehachapi Mountains. He used the Times to fight back, commissioning poems like Edward Vincent's “Southern California”: “The time, the place, the opportunity, the advantage are yours/ Oh, the fairest southern land.” Otis rejected San Francisco's shenanigans the same way Lynyrd Skynyrd responded in “Sweet Home Alabama” to Neil Young's anti-Southern insults: “by singing songs about the South.”
Otis wasn't the first person to call Los Angeles the South, but he was the loudest, brandishing the word in his aggressive drive. In the boom-and-bust year of 1887, when the San Jose Mercury News encouraged central California to draw tourists away from the “populated South,” Otis accused the “disaffected North” of “sectional jealousy,” deploring its plots against “ this fair and sunny southern land.”
Here, “southern land” referred to geography. But a month later, the Times accused “all of Northern California” of conspiring against “Southland” and sent agents to “spy the land and send the rookies north.” In this case, “Southland” represented a new region. As a Times writer explained: “We read a lot about the New South, referring to the Southern states of our Union. “California has a New South and the world at large is beginning to know it.” Increasingly, New Southern California adopted a connection to the old.
On the one hand, this seemed appropriate, since Los Angeles's early years were filled with immigrants from the South who had supported the Confederacy. “Let it never be forgotten,” declared the San Francisco Bulletin in 1862, “that Los Angeles County, in this day of danger to the Republic, is two to one for Dixie and Disunion.” But Otis was no southerner. He was a Union veteran from Ohio who had fought at Antietam.
When Otis promoted Southern California, he wasn't expressing the pride of a regional native: he was creating a new domain. He had spent his glory days triumphing over the old Southland, and he repeated that triumph on the West Coast. “General Otis” borrowed military vocabulary to call his Los Angeles mansion “the Bivouac” and his Times staff “the Phalanx” as he built and ruled a new Southern Land.
Unfortunately, Otis's new rule replicated the worst of the old: it became another white oligarchy where the rich got richer and the working class suffered. Otis made a fortune from real estate speculation while his rampant union busting led to the bombing of The Times in 1910, which killed 21 people.
It would take Los Angeles another century to build a better South. That work, in California and the United States, remains unfinished.
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.”
