Upton Sinclair on the Upper-Class Fondness for Things Southern

Upton Sinclair, if raised in Baltimore and New York, was a Southerner by ancestry and aspects of his acculturation, and so was the second wife to whom he was married when he wrote the Dead Hand books--an upper-class Southerner whose family sent her from Mississippi all the way to Fifth Avenue to attend "finishing school." As Sinclair remarks when discussing her experience in the course of surveying America's education system The Goslings--and in the process showing us the limitations of the private schools as well as the public--he remarked "the prestige which attaches to [the South] in the world of elegance" due to its all "ha[ving] been written up in romances," such that "mining princesses from Idaho and the cattle kings' daughters from Wyoming were eager to model themselves upon the gestures and mannerisms of a real daughter of the Confederacy" such as his wife when she had been a student. Indeed, Sinclair explains, if--as was common for men and women of her class--she had got her English from the unlettered servants who did the actual work of bringing her up, "[t]he teachers at this school were forbidden to correct her Southern dialect," her errors called "charm" by "the Goulds and Vanderbilts."

Such was the attraction of the privileged to anything which smacks of aristocracy, Southern, or English, and anything else--and just as with much else he mocked in his books it all still stands today in 2024.