By Andy Brack
Just longer than 103 years ago, a German immigrant who grew up in Charleston published a flowery analysis of South Carolina as part of a two-year, 48-part series by The Nation magazine. The collection showcased “the distinctive colors of life” in a project dubbed “These United States.”
Fast forward to the present. In a special two-month issue of the magazine, The Nation has another go in looking at the state of the republic in a report that’s vastly different – “These Dis-United States.”
“50 of our best writers and artists depict local textures, practices, landmarks and institutions everywhere being gutted, steamrolled, defunded, eviscerated. Here we get first hand testimony, from Maine to Hawaii, of the acceleration of a decades-long project to hollow out government at every level – and of the devastating effects of that project on our national life,” contributing editor Richard Kreitner writes in the opening essay of the magazine’s 160th anniversary issue.
While the original essays in the 1920s highlighted what made states distinctive, they seemed to assume the “united” states worked toward the common goal of promoting and advancing democracy. States were places where experiments could occur to achieve overarching goals that knit together Americans who lived in vastly different circumstances. While these essays seemed generally to have a buoyancy and overall hope about the country, the new 2025 essays look at what’s happening across the “bruised and battered land,” ending with a call for the country to give “a new birth of freedom … making an old country anew.”
Both essays about the Palmetto State make interesting reading, mainly because they don’t seem to conform to the overall theme of either project.
A century ago, the magazine’s then-drama critic, Ludwig Lewisohn, essentially bemoaned the divisions in South Carolina between Charleston and the Upstate. His essay wasn’t about unity in South Carolina or hope.
Rather, Lewisohn, not a household name today, described cultural decay in Charleston, once a flourishing home to snobbish elites who he said wrote poetry and studied Greek and Latin. He lamented control of the state by Upstate agrarians with the “mean barbarism of sharp business men and Ku Klux Klansmen.” He complained the state’s new leaders, spurred by “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, “brought neither freedom nor enlightenment” but sentimentalized the old South.
In some ways, Lewisohn’s criticisms of the 1920s “New South” in South Carolina don’t seem all that different from criticisms of the divisions being caused by MAGA acolytes across the nation today.
In the newer essay, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Albert Scardino of Bluffton, a member of The Nation’s editorial board, bemoaned the dangers of living along the coast where more people flock despite increased threats from climate change. While he took a potshot at coastal GOP U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace over her obsession with transgender people, Scardino’s essay mostly focused on the 1.4 million people who live near the water, which he described as akin to “a sandcastle on the beach facing an incoming tide.”
The only “unity” in the piece was the fact that everyone along the coast faces unstable summer weather. Scardino reminded readers that 2,000 people died in an 1893 hurricane when comparatively few people lived in the path. Hilton Head Island, he wrote, had just 300 people in 1950, but has 40,000 now with one escape route over the Intracoastal Waterway.
Two essays more than 100 years apart. Both lament change in different ways. Both lack hope.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of the Charleston City Paper and Statehouse Report. Have a comment? Send it to feedback@statehousereport.com.
