Let the South Go

The 7,000 readers of the Virginia City (Nev.) Territorial Enterprise are no strangers to proposals in ornate Victorian prose to turn the clock back. Some time after he revived the long dormant Enterprise for a plaything in 1952, aging (57) Dandy Lucius Beebe, onetime high-society chronicler for the New York Herald Tribune, genially proclaimed: "The editorial policy of the Enterprise is benevolent backwardness--reaction against everything." Last week the enterprising Enterprise, tongue only half in cheek, declared that since the centennial of the Civil War is to be observed next year, it might be fitting to reverse history and have the President of the U.S., "as umpire of battle re-creations," declare that the South had won after all. "In other words, permit the Southern states to secede from the Union for keeps. For nine decades they've been out of step with the rest of the nation anyhow, so why not accept the fact and permit the Confederate States of America to officially form itself?

"The benefits that would accrue are almost dazzling. No longer would the country's progress be obstructed or impeded by Southern Congressmen hoary with seniority and ready to invoke the filibuster whenever their sectional demands are thwarted. No longer would the law-abiding states of the Union be dismayed by the doings of the Faubuses and the Davises and other rabblerousers . . .

"At this very moment," the editorial concluded, "groups of Southern electors are on record as bombastically bragging that their states' mandates in the matter of casting of electoral votes need not be obeyed. At this very moment one of the South's truly civilized and gracious cities, New Orleans, is torn by ugly racial strife openly encouraged by those sworn to uphold the laws. Should the Confederacy be established, such shenanigans would be of no more than parochial interest, to be regarded by the 37 United States in the same light as revolts in Iran . . . The Southerners could buy our automobiles and we would buy their textiles. Barley would go for bourbon and books for petroleum. The U.S. would undoubtedly do the handsome thing by sponsoring the C.S.A. for entry into the United Nations, where Khrushchev & Co. would soon learn a thing or two about the fine art of obstructionism."

The idea was characteristic of Playboy Beebe's style, but the earnest undertone of it (something Beebe religiously avoids) marks it as the work of Managing Editor Robert L. Richards, 49. Richards didn't expect to lose many readers, even among Nevada's transplanted Southerners. Said he: "Of course, I meant it in a light way. But I really feel that the South has been a pain in the neck for 90 years, and we would be better off without them. And I know a lot of other people around here feel the same way."

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