Bozart," and Wood found it difficult to add anything to Mencken's indictment. He could only ask, once again, what Alabama had contributed "to music, to drama, to sculpture, to painting, to literature," or to the "absorbing world of science, that handmaiden of man in his progress from beasthood." Only Virginia and North Carolina, among Southern states, came in for mildly favorable comment. According to Douglas Southall Freeman, the "new educational movement" was the "hope of every progressive Virginian." Robert Watson Winston took comfort from the existence of an "active, forward-looking element" in North Carolina, a state that no longer proclaimed herself "provincial and proud of it."

Condemnation of Southern backwardness, in a liberal weekly, might have been expected. More surprising was that a series conceived as an exploration of diversity so often ended by holding up a uniform standard of cultural progress, one measured by great works of art and notable achievements in science and technology. None of the contributors asked whether a new order in the South would not have to rest on traditions indigenous to the region. None showed much interest in the requirements for a vigorous civic life, as opposed to the number of orchestras, art galleries, libraries, and universities. The implication was that "civilization," if it was ever to come to the South, would have to come from outside. The only hope for Mississippi, according to Beulah Amidon Ratliff, was an invasion of "missionaries" from the North. Like the rest of the South, Mississippi needed "educational missionaries, to bring both white and colored schools up to modern standards; medical missionaries, to teach hygiene and sanitation; ... agricultural missionaries, to teach modern methods of farming." Only in the wake of a second reconstruction would the "light of civilization penetrate the uttermost parts" of Dixie.

The South was evidently not alone in its cultural stagnation. Nevada was the "most backward" state of all, according to Anne Martin; but it had plenty of competition. The West as a whole had known democracy only in its crudest form, as in Walter C. Hawes's Wyoming, where a "community of roistering young bachelors" had set the cultural tone. The history of Colorado, like that of other western states, was a "continuous story of colossal waste," as Easley M. Jones saw it. In Idaho, the "gambling spirit" at least helped to counter the "tendency toward conformity," in the opinion of M. R. Stone, although it also diverted energy from "cultural interests" to "practical problems."

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