ost
of the daily newspapers cry out for brightness and vitality and at the
same time shut out critical ideas. They want intellect, but want it
petrified. Happily, the publishers of books have not yet reached that
form of delusion. In an article entitled "What Ideas Are Safe?" in
the _Saturday Review of Literature_ for November 5, 1949, Henry Steele
Commager says:

If we establish a standard of safe thinking, we will end up with no
thinking at all.... We cannot... have thought half slave and half
free.... A nation which, in the name of loyalty or of patriotism or of
any sincere and high-sounding ideal, discourages criticism and dissent,
and puts a premium on acquiescence and conformity, is headed for
disaster.

Unless a writer feels free, things will not come to him, he cannot
burgeon on any subject whatsoever.

In 1834 Davy Crockett's _Autobiography_ was published. It is one of
the primary social documents of America. It is as much Davy Crockett,
whether going ahead after bears in a Tennessee canebrake or going ahead
after General Andrew Jackson in Congress, as the equally plain but also
urbane _Autobiography_ of Franklin is Benjamin Franklin. It is undiluted
regionalism. It is provincial not only in subject but in point of view.

No provincial mind of this day could possibly write an autobiography or
any other kind of book co-ordinate in value with Crockett's "classic in
homespun." In his time, Crockett could exercise intelligence and still
retain his provincial point of view. Provincialism was in the air over
his land. In these changed times, something in the ambient air prevents
any active intelligence from being unconscious of lands, peoples,
struggles far beyond any province.

Not long after the Civil War, in Harris County, Texas, my father heard a
bayou-billy yell out:

Whoopee! Raised in a canebrake and suckled by a she-bear!
The click of a six-shooter is music to my ear!
The further up the creek you go, the worse they git,
And I come from the head of it! Whoopee!

If it were now possible to find some section of country so far up above
the forks of the creek that the owls mate there with the chickens, and
if this section could send to Congress one of its provincials untainted
by the outside world, he would, if at all intelligent, soon after
arriving on Capitol Hill become aware of interdependencies between his
remote province and the rest of the world.

Biographies of regional characters, stories