Apart from lending his name to a local high school, Walter Hines Page had only limited contact with the city of Greensboro. But in his only novel, "The Southerner" (1909), Page drew deeply on what the historian William Chafe called Greensboro's "progressive mystique" in shaping his own tale of Southern progress.

The man

Born in 1855 in what is now Cary, Page attended Trinity College (later Duke University) before undertaking graduate study at Johns Hopkins, where a progressive, scientific intellectual milieu caused him to re-evaluate the orthodox Christianity of his childhood.

Page spent the majority of his career in journalism and publishing, eventually becoming the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. In 1899, he co-founded the publishing house of Doubleday, Page, and Co., which quickly expanded its author list to include Rudyard Kipling, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Helen Keller and Booker T. Washington. Washington's "Up from Slavery" was written at Page's suggestion -- not surprisingly, given the two men's shared emphasis on practical education.

The novel

Despite a long career in American letters and a compelling record of journalism on the "Southern problem," Page had never written a novel until 1906, when he serially published "The Autobiography of a Southerner" in the Atlantic. Three years later, a heavily revised version of the novel appeared in book form as "The Southerner."

Recently republished in the University of South Carolina Press' Southern Classics series, "The Southerner" is the story of Nicholas Worth, a Harvard-educated North Carolinian who confronts at every turn the inertial forces and institutions impeding the South's entrance into modernity.

Sharply critical of elitist, rhetoric-based educational training that favored "rotund, even grandiose phrases" over precise observation, Page organizes "The Southerner" around Worth's efforts to modernize the South through its schools.

Worth has an advocate in his endeavor in Professor Billy McBain, an educational reformer, who is based on Charles Duncan McIver, the first chancellor of the State Normal College for Women (now UNCG).

In 1897, McIver had invited Page, long an ally in the work of Southern educational reform, to give the commencement address at State Normal. Following McIver's untimely death in 1906, Page sought to memorialize through the character of Professor Billy the man he called "the most untiring & patriotic & public spirited citizen of any state." When revising the novel, Page expanded the role of Professor Billy by emphasizing his role as reformer.

Contemporary readers in Greensboro may be surprised that the city appears in Page's novel as Energetic Edinboro, a restless town of movers and shakers. (In 1924, journalist Gerald Johnson wrote that Greensboro's "muezzins summon us to prayer with the sacred formula, 'There is no God but Advertising, and Atlanta is his prophet.' ") Less surprising is that Worth stirs controversy as Edinboro's school superintendent: History does have a way of repeating itself.

In 1896, Page wrote that "the intellectual life of the [Southern] people has been hindered unspeakably by the narrowness of religious opinion," and he used "The Southerner" to illustrate the point.

After publishing a historical pamphlet critical of Civil War mythologies, Worth runs afoul of traditionalists who run him out of town "in the Name of Our Holy Religion. ... in the Name of our History and our Honoured Dead. . . [and] in the Name of our Anglo-Saxon Civilerzation." [sic] Although Worth loses the battle, the war for progress eventually gains traction, a movement signaled by Professor Billy's founding of a "school for girls."

Progress and the South

In Page's view, progress depended on the South acquiring a clear sense of its own history. Unlike other New South advocates such as Henry Grady, who sought to romanticize the Old South, Page rejected the myths of the Lost Cause and of antebellum moonlight and magnolias. In order to "lay the foundations of a new sort of patriotism," he goes "further backwards" to document an industrious people free of the ghosts of traditionalism, cultural romanticism and religious orthodoxy.

Another ghost Page confronts is the specter of race. In his 1903 "Souls of Black Folk," W.E.B. DuBois had declared the problem of the 20th century to be the problem of the color line. "The Southerner" engages that problem with complexity and, one must add, evasion. Looking forward to Toni Morrison's analysis of race in American fiction, "Playing in the Dark," Page diagnoses the "Negro-in-America" as a "form of insanity that overtakes white men." Noting the white South's obsession with racial purity, Worth observes that "We had for three long generations been really ruled by the Negro." At the same time, Page devotes more attention to such pathological effects on Southern whites than he does to the condition of African Americans in the Jim Crow South.

Although hardly free from the racial prejudices of his time, Page deserves credit for detaching Progressivism from the white supremacist doctrines to which it was often linked, a linkage prominent, for example, in the career of N.C. Gov. Charles Aycock, whose support for education and other Progressive causes went hand-in-hand with a virulent white supremacy.

The achievement of "The Southerner" lies in its depiction of the ghosts of the Church, the Lost Cause and "Anglo-Saxon Civilerzation" as they collectively thwarted what Page viewed as the South's unrealized potential.

In pushing away from the dead specters of the traditional order, Page tried to imagine what the South might be in the aftermath of ghosts, systems and formulas.

Had he written the novel of "present Southern life" he was pondering in 1911, Page might have left a clearer sense of that South. But he soon found himself embroiled in the world of politics, culminating in service as ambassador to Great Britain during World War I. As it was, he left in "The Southerner" a classic document of the Progressive era.

Scott Romine (sbromine@ uncg.edu) is an associate professor of English at UNCG and the author of "The Narrative Forms of Southern Community." He wrote an introduction to the 2008 reissue of "The Southerner" by University of South Carolina Press.

An excerpt from 'The Southerner’

The town of Edinboro, having outgrown its former limits and its old-time ways, had taken on an energetic mood. Its cotton mills, its lumber mills and its stores that supplied the country merchants over a wide area had brought a new spirit of commercial activity; and this activity had attracted ambitious country youths who were making the town grow very fast both by their work and by their talk. Many of them wore badges that bore a double E, which stood for Energetic Edinboro. Especially when they made visits to the neighbouring towns it was a point of loyalty to wear these badges. The Edinboro Torch printed "energetic Edinboro" at the top of its first page, and every week the leading editorial was in praise of the town. One week its readers found this piece of news for their encouragement:

AGAIN THE BEST THERE IS

The new graded school will be finished next week — the finest public school-building in the State. The finest building — next, the finest school. That's coming, too. The Board has, with customary energy, engaged as superintendent Professor Nicholas Worth, a scion of one of our old families, and a man who has studied at a Northern university, and is thoroughly acquainted with all the latest and most progressive methods. We welcome the learned Professor. The best is none too good for Edinboro.