A review of Many Roads: A Fred Reed Treasury Vol. 1: Down Dixie Way: The South and Southerners (Shotwell Publishing, 2026) by Fred Reed.
When I was an undergraduate in college, I would spend hours at the library reading the opinion pieces in various major newspapers.
For those too young to remember, the library hung newspapers on long sticks that could be confused for wooden lances. They could double as that when you sparred with your friends. These have almost disappeared from existence.
Some libraries still use them, but many public libraries have almost given up on books, let alone newspapers.
I enjoyed the columns. They were punchy, edgy, hilarious, and witty. At least some of them. The best were worth reading at least few times. I collected old papers so I could go back over them when I wanted to pick at one of my Marxist professors. I was once told by one of these activists that the only paper worth reading was the New York Times.
I have a subscription to this day, but not for the reasons he stated. It can be my muse. A bad column by Jamelle Bouie has more value than a good one by some twenty-something blogger online.
But what I enjoyed most about the opinion section has nearly gone the way of the dinosaur.
There were giants in those days.
As I am pecking this out on my keyboard, Pat Buchanan just turned 88.
His work always drove a stake through the heart of the Left, and his name can send sensitive establishment folks into seizures.
It’s worth it.
I remember Sam Francis’s columns at The Washington Times. He later had a larger following online, but that was after he was ingloriously fired because Dinesh D’Souza called him bad names.
Joe Sobran, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, James J. Kilpatrick, and Lewis Grizzard, among others, had something worthwhile to say.
But I always enjoyed a few voices who never had that kind of following. Charlie Reese comes to mind, but so does Fred Reed.
Fred Reed hit 81 this year. Again, the GOATS are being put to pasture.
Thankfully, Shotwell Publishing has started reprinting many of Fred’s amazing columns from “Fred on Everything” and decades as a journalist and opinionator. Maybe he’s a proto-influencer. Lord knows many a young man picked up a cigar because a few of these men were pictured smoking one while having fun.
The first volume is a collection of columns that focus on “The South and Southerners.” Just the way it should be.
Fred states that he never thought of himself as a Southerner until he went to college. It was just living. But once you are faced with Yankee hypocrisy and a few “Karens” as they are called today, you quickly figure it out.
They are just different.
And Fred is just different and irreverent enough to make them mad. I like that.
The reading is easy and funny, just as a column should be.
And most of it is one big middle finger to those who slander the South and the Southern tradition. There are stories of old times not forgotten, at least they weren’t thirty years ago, but most young Southerners wouldn’t recognize them today.
Which is what makes this kind of book so important.
Robert Ruark’s Old Man and the Boy introduced a generation of young men my age a bit younger to a disappearing South. Reed’s stories can have the same effect.
Young Southerners are ditching the traditional South in favor of something else, still Southern, but not Southern.
Fred Reed came of age during a turbulent time in American history. He had one foot in the Old South–he correctly called it civilized–and one foot in a South that lost its way.
That is our South.
Reading his old columns makes you want that Old South, or at the very least to be around people who don’t mind loving that Old South.
Some of the generational banter that takes place online is, in some respects, the direct result of the loss of the newspaper columnist. Young people have lost that anchor to the past. Purposefully I suspect.
They have no respect, and most people can’t write like the columnists of old did.
Thankfully, we can preserve some of the old ways with books like Many Roads: Down Dixie Way The South and Southerners. More volumes are in the queue.
If only it would fit on a newspaper stick.
