The Hill Gentry

RED HILLS AND COTTON: AN UP-COUNTRY MEMORY--Ben Robertson-->> Knopf ($2.50).

This is an eloquent hymn to one Southern way of life--that of the Hill Gentry. It is also an indigenous statement of the idea for which many Southerners believe the South fought the Civil War--that only those governments are strong which are based on the land and its people, not on factories and the people who own or work in them. Ben Robertson is a Scotch-Irishman from the red clay hills of South Carolina, a correspondent for New York's PM and a radiant devotee of the New Deal.

Webbed and Woven. For two hundred years the Robertson "kinfolks," who number about 1,000, have inhabited the valleys of the ruddy Twelve Mile River and the glassy Keowee, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. They are "intermarried, webbed and woven like a rug."

The Robertsons never called themselves "planters." They are dirt farmers, with no pillared porticoes. They have been Democrats since Jefferson's first term. They have been Baptists since before the Great Revival in 1800. In a hot and sensuous land, they are the fierce inheritors of "the direct Protestant Reformation."

Oh, The Dear Blue Hills. Daniel Boone was a kinsman ("a mighty poor provider," his wife said). Another Robertson founded Nashville. Others have carried the Twelve Mile Valley customs into the Texas Panhandle and Montana. But as rovers they are permanently homesick. There are old letters in the Robertson trunks as touching as a poem by Burns: "Oh, I long for a sight of the dear mountains. My mind wanders all the time back to lovely Keowee Valley. Oh, the dear cotton fields. Oh, the dear blue hills."

If the Robertsons have stopped fighting the War Between the States, they have not stopped keening at defeat. Ben Robertson grew up amid the living grief of the last generation of Confederates. He and his kin felt that it was the North that had seceded: "It seems to me that we were the Union, and that the Union went with us--the uninterrupted strain of the United States moved along to Richmond and then back again to the north bank of the Potomac."

Even in 1941, at a parade in San Francisco, Robertson was staggered when a U.S. Army band burst into Marching Through Georgia: "My army playing that tune! I could not have been more surprised had it struck up The Watch on the Rhine."

A Working Gentleman. In Ben Robertson's reverential portraits his elders are stirring American archetypes. His Grandfather Bowen fought from First Manassas to Appomattox. He was "a Southern gentleman" who "worked in the fields all his life along with the rest of the hands. On weekdays except Saturdays he wore linsey-woolsey breeches and a loose blue shirt, open at the neck, and from sunrise to sundown, except for the hour of his nap, he would plow and hoe cotton, pull fodder, thin corn. . . . On Saturdays, the year round, he would put on a white shirt with a black shoestring tie and a black frock coat and black trousers and would drive in to the Courthouse in the carriage to attend to public affairs." He "regarded office-holding in an old-fashioned manner: it was a duty."

He was against liquor. He could deal with any human being, but "a corporation is beyond emotion; it was organized for that reason." Robertson says: "All of us hated bankers and we hated merchants. We hated them because they had robbed us--they should have been shot and we should have shot them, but always they had been so legal in their dirty business that we never felt quite justified in going after them with a gun." He had just one defense against such robbers: "Time and again our grandfather said to us: 'Never mortgage a foot of the land--no matter what happens, don't mortgage it, and if you haven't cash money, don't buy; and if times are hard, do without.' "

Northern Mind, Southern Heart. By following that advice, the Robertsons survived. They "lived the cotton life." They held on to their land as they held to life. From 1870 to 1910 cotton kept them in "a sort of luxurious poverty." Even in the far more difficult decades that followed, with the cotton fields of India and Kenya muscling in on their market, the Robertsons made out. "Then," says Robertson, "came the catastrophe that saved us--the bursting of the industrial bubble."

"We came through the depression. . . . Also we still held to our original Confederate theory that the land and not the factory was the rock to build the state on. . . . We believe in the spirit. We realize that the spirit alone is not enough, but on the other hand neither is the machine enough. We do not believe in any return to medieval ruralism. What we believe in is going on toward an American state that will be ruled by the Northern mind and guided by the Southern heart."

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