by John Egerton
These were signs that something was drastically wrong in the land of cotton, but not much notice was taken. Sixty-five years after the Civil War ended, the South was still traumatized by its catastrophic defeat. It looked to the North with envy, resentment, hatred, defiance, and an apparently incurable inferiority complex. Far from exhibiting a desire to be free from the burden of history, the South seemed instead to cling obsessively to its past, to relive it and even rewrite it. The glorious Lost Cause had instilled a sense of pride and honor and moral superiority in many whites, but the hard truth was that the South in the 1930s was itself a lost cause, a downtrodden region haplessly nursing wounds that were as much self-inflicted as administered from without.
Consider its isolation. A case could be made that the restoration of trains and ships for freight and passenger service in the South never caught up to the North after the Civil War simply because the capital was not available to finance it. And, since Northern industrialists produced all the cars, trucks, buses, and tractors—and the Southern states couldn’t afford to build roads—the disparity continued into the automotive age. There were five million mules in the South in 1932, but only fifty thousand tractors—one for every fifty farms. Northerners had twice as many automobiles per capita as Southerners, and a far more modern and extensive network of roads. Trains and buses were the modes of public transportation in this pre-airline era, and they too provided better service in the North than in the South. The isolation of the South, so the argument goes, was a direct consequence of its economic disadvantage.
But there is another kind of isolation, more mental than physical, and in this realm the South seemed intent on raising the walls around itself. Radio was knitting the nation more closely together (television, of course, had not been introduced), but the rural South was hardly tuned in at all, because electricity had only reached one in every twenty-five farms. There were some pretty good newspapers in the region, and even some small-circulation magazines and journals, but only a tiny percentage of families was able to nurture regular reading habits. The South had by far the highest illiteracy rate in the nation (five times as high in South Carolina as in Pennsylvania or Illinois or California), and it was dead last in the number of libraries and in the frequency of their use.
Schools also lagged far behind. Only about four million Southern children—half the ones under age eighteen—were enrolled at all; the rest spent their days working on the farms and in the factories (that is, if they were lucky enough to be occupied at all). The school days per year were fewer by a month or more in the South than in the North, and the annual state and local expenditures were so low (thirty-five to seventy-five dollars per pupil, less than half the national average) that the fourteen lowest slots in the national rankings were all occupied by Southern and border states. Since federal funds for schools were negligible to nonexistent, this was the extent of public education. No wonder only sixty thousand young people graduated from high school in the South in 1930.
In the private sector, Northern philanthropy provided most of the educational opportunity available to whites in the isolated mountains of Appalachia and to blacks throughout the South until the 1930s. The Rockefellers and Peabodys, Julius Rosenwald, John F. Slater, Anna T. Jeanes, and the Congregational Church appear to have done almost as much for the education of the Southern poor in the seventy-five years following the Civil War as all of the South’s state and local governments combined.
Higher education in the pre-depression years was a luxury that only a relative handful of Southerners could experience. More contributions from wealthy Northerners and federal appropriations under the Morrill Land-Grant Act had created close to seventy-five public and private colleges for Negroes between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Great Depression, but they could offer their limited curricula to only a few hundred students each—and many were, in reality, little more than high schools and vocational schools. There were about 250 public and private colleges and universities for whites in the region by 1930—and they too were, by and large, an undistinguished lot. Only the state universities of Texas, North Carolina, and Virginia had graduate programs or libraries of any magnitude, and among private institutions, only Emory, Duke, Vanderbilt, Tulane, Rice, and perhaps one or two others were remotely comparable. In the entire South in 1930, only 186,000 students, white and black, were enrolled in college. Among the 30,000 or so who graduated—quite literally, one in a thousand of the South’s people—were a substantial number who quickly sought greener pastures beyond the magnolia curtain.
The elite nature of higher education and the classical construction of its curriculum further widened the gap between the privileged few and the needy many, but another form of mental isolation was almost as destructive. Within the colleges and universities themselves, a rigid orthodoxy of thought and opinion governed virtually every discipline and field of study. Scholars who dared to broaden the prevailing historical, scientific, political, religious, or racial perspectives of their communities were forced out of one institution after another across the South in the first three decades of this century. Both the politicians who indirectly controlled public colleges and the religious and civic stewards of private institutions tended to see themselves more as guardians of established truth and righteousness than as leaders in a search for enlightenment. With rare exceptions, academic freedom was perpetually endangered, if it existed at all.
Colleges and universities, hardly less than the other principal institutions of Southern society, reinforced and extended a circumscribed culture defined by the prevailing interpretations of history, religion, the arts and sciences, socioeconomic class, race, politics. The manifestations of this narrow view reached far beyond the academy. They could be seen in the bigotry and intolerance of all religious people toward the nonreligious (of whom there were precious few admitted ones); of Christians toward Jews (there being only about 150,000 of the latter); of Protestants toward the million or so Catholics; and even of Baptists and Methodists (about fifteen million total) toward Presbyterians and Episcopalians—who were, of course, reciprocally disdainful. They could be seen in the frequency of official acts of censorship against books, movies, plays, and other forms of artistic expression. They could be seen in common reactions of suspicion, fear, and hostility toward critics, outsiders, or anyone else whose speech, appearance, or behavior was perceived to be “different.” Since almost everyone in the South was of either Anglo-Saxon or African descent, others were easy to spot.
Massive contradictions were bred by this self-imposed posture of intellectual isolation. The South embraced Prohibition with righteous fervor long before Congress approved the Eighteenth Amendment in 1917 and long after it was repealed in 1933—but from start to finish, Southerners drank as much liquor as anyone else, and made more illicit moonshine than everyone else. Two-thirds of the fourteen thousand whiskey stills and the half-million gallons of busthead booze seized and destroyed by federal revenue agents in 1931 were uncovered in the South—and yet, more bootleg whiskey reached the market from this region than from any other sectional cluster of states. (Incidentally, the South also supplied most of the nation’s cigarettes and soda pop.)
Gambling and other vices, and lawlessness in general, thrived in a shadowy Southern landscape hidden from public scrutiny. Even as the South was sending the highest percentage of people to church and displaying in other ways an abundance of piety, it was spilling its own blood as if the region were at war. Only a couple of states in the so-called Wild West came close to matching the South’s proclivity for violent crimes. Kentucky and Tennessee had ten times more armed robberies and aggravated assaults per 100,000 people than Wisconsin, and North Carolina had a rate of murders and killings eight times greater than New York’s. (A murder, someone Southern once explained, is a capital offense committed by one stranger against another; a killing is a homicide resulting from conflict between parties known to, perhaps even kin to, each other.)
Lynchin
g, a damning measure of any society’s tolerance for violent behavior, had always been a problem in the United States, and especially in the South. Tuskegee Institute in Alabama tried for many years to keep records of this crime, in the hope that exposure would compel society to abolish it. According to the institute’s figures, there were 2,771 lynchings (defined as mob violence against a person in custody, or one being pursued for an alleged crime) in the United States between 1890 and 1930, and the victims in the vast preponderance of these illegal executions were black men in the South. Not included in the Tuskegee count were large numbers of fugitives hunted down and killed by deputized posses (not officially mobs) and many others reported as “escaped from custody.” Lynch victims almost always died slow, agonizing, tortured deaths by hanging, burning, beating, dragging, butchering, or some other sadistic means.
More than five hundred blacks were lynched in Mississippi during that forty-year period; more than four hundred died in Georgia, and more than three hundred each in Louisiana and Texas. About two hundred whites were lynched in those four states combined during the same years. Congress almost enacted a federal anti-lynching statute in 1922, but a filibuster of Southern senators killed the bill after it had passed by a wide margin in the House—and Southern lawmakers managed from then on to block all such attempts to punish lynchers. Left to their own crime-solving devices, the Southern states were totally ineffective in prosecuting lynchers; not even one atrocity in a hundred ended with a participants being tried and convicted.
As the decade of the 1930s began, the number of reported lynchings had diminished to a range of ten to twenty a year, but a related problem—violence within the criminal justice system—was receiving more national attention, and it was notoriously excessive in the South. Conditions and practices inside state prisons were widely understood to be—even accepted as—medieval and Draconian in nature; any form of punishment, including torture, could be administered without strong objection from the outside. Convict leasing had finally been outlawed, but local and state officials still found surreptitious ways for farmers, factory owners, and others to keep prison inmates in a state of virtual slavery while they “worked off” payment for their crimes. Chain gangs were common in every Southern state. And, since virtually all police officers, judges, lawyers, jurors, and jailers were white males, the potential for routine injustice to all blacks—and to white women as well—was constantly present. All that saved white women—and occasionally black women—from the worst possible fate was the white male’s Freudian fear of, and latent guilt concerning, women in general. Nothing saved the black male; he bore the brunt of pain and suffering in every Southern state’s approach to crime and punishment.
A revealing indicator of the extent to which Southern blacks were at the mercy of the law-enforcement system was contained in a pamphlet called “Burnt Cork and Crime.” It was written by Robert B. Eleazer, a white researcher at the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, an Atlanta-based agency founded after World War I. In it, Eleazer documented dozens of cases in which whites had disguised themselves as blacks and committed crimes that innocent blacks were subsequently arrested for—and often convicted.
Criminal justice was by no means the only segment of society in which blacks were vulnerable in the depression-era South, of course. Any thorough review of conditions in the region during that period is bound to turn up one example after another of social and economic problems that were essentially racial in nature. State and local laws mandating segregation of the races didn’t become widespread until the 1890s, but in less than forty years they had raised barriers between whites and blacks in the region that were practically impenetrable. In essence, the ruling whites had managed to nullify virtually all of the basic civil and political rights of black citizens—and both houses of Congress, a succession of Democratic and Republican presidents, and the United States Supreme Court (in the historic Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896) had actively aided in the dismemberment.
It doesn’t seem in any sense an overstatement to say that racial mores finally became the single most prominent characteristic that set the South apart from the rest of the country. In 1910, when the segregation laws were almost fully in effect, more than eighty percent of all black Americans lived in the eleven Old South states. Oppressive social and economic conditions eventually drove millions of them out of the region; a half-century later, in 1960, almost as many blacks would live outside the South as in it. And, since the segregation laws have been repealed, visible evidence of regional differences in racial prejudice has just about disappeared.
In the thirties, though, such evidence was everywhere. All of the border states, from Delaware and Maryland to Missouri and Oklahoma, mandated some forms of segregation by law, and even a few states not contiguous to the South (Kansas, for example) permitted segregation in the public schools. If you go back far enough in American history, you’ll find racial discrimination in the laws and practices of every state. As recently as the late 1940s, fourteen states far away from the South, including Michigan, Colorado, Oregon, and California, had laws prohibiting racial intermarriage. But primarily, it was the eleven states of the old Confederacy that built compulsory segregation and blatant white supremacy into their laws and customs across the board, and that’s what made them seem so different from the rest of the country in the 1930s.
Segregation was defended by whites as part and parcel of the age-old “Southern way of life,” but in truth the practice was a post-slavery, post–Civil War, post-Reconstruction scheme to isolate the black citizenry from the democratic process and to reestablish and perpetuate white supremacy. For more than a decade after the Civil War ended, states and local communities attempted with varying degrees of success to reorder their societies in such a way that citizens of whatever race or class could enjoy basic civil rights and participate in the political process. This was in part coerced by decree of the governments installed under the Reconstruction laws, but there were some white Southerners who approved of the philosophy of inclusion, or at least accepted it as a matter of enlightened self-interest. It was not unheard of in that period for blacks to vote, run for office, be elected, and serve; to testify and serve on juries; to enjoy restaurants, saloons, parks, and other public gathering places; to sit where they pleased in theaters and trains; and to live wherever they could afford to buy housing.
But then, after Reconstruction ended, the old guard of powerful white planters and others—the so-called Bourbons—began to regain control and reassert their authority over blacks and low-income whites. When friction developed between the races—competition for jobs, for political office, and such—the ruling whites found it expedient to keep the working-class whites in line by giving them certain privileges and immunities that were denied to blacks. At first through informal manipulation and then, gradually, through ordinances and laws, blacks were removed from the mainstream of Southern life and relegated to “their place” on the periphery.
And so, over the next couple of decades (from the mid-1880s until about 1906), Jim Crow was born—or, to be more precise (and ironic), I should say adopted, for in fact the practice of racial separation that came to bear the Jim Crow tag was modeled after procedures widely used in Northern cities before the Civil War. (In The Strange Career of Jim Crow, historian C. Vann Woodward documented the systematic exclusion of blacks from public and political life in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other cities in the decades before the Civil War.) The Populist Party’s short-lived reform movement of the 1890s was to be the last manifestation of an enlightened democratic spirit in the South; after that failed and the Republicans abandoned the region to the Bourbons, the “Solid South” of white supremacy was reestablished.
Jim Crow was one more Yankee invention of dubious benefit to the South, but the whites in charge seized upon it with uncritical haste. First they segregated the railroads, ordering blacks into the front coaches nearest the sooty engine and coal car. (When buses came along, blacks were sen
t to the back; no system was ever devised to segregate seating on airplanes.) Segregation spread rapidly through the entire fabric of the society. The franchise was taken away, and elective office went with it; the last black politician on the national scene, Congressman George H. White of North Carolina, left the House of Representatives in 1901, and no other blacks from the South would serve again in Congress until 1972, when Andrew Young of Georgia and Barbara Jordan of Texas were elected. (In the North, Illinois and New York were the only states to elect an African-American congressman in the first half of this century.) Poll taxes, white primaries, literacy tests, and other rules designed to remove blacks from voting had precisely that effect. The only exceptions were in more moderate border cities such as Louisville, or in places like Memphis and San Antonio, where machine bosses controlled the black vote and used it to stay in power.
In courtrooms, where black lawyers were exceedingly rare and black judges nonexistent, new restrictions were placed on the status of blacks as plaintiffs, witnesses, and jurors. Hospitals, where black doctors and nurses could not practice, denied admission to black patients. (Even blood was segregated.) Churches, which had split along racial lines before the Civil War, reaffirmed their separateness, as did schools and colleges. All types of public accommodations, from parks and theaters to restaurants and libraries, adopted segregation policies, and the same applied to toilets and water fountains. There were white and black newspapers. There were jobs and unions and even entire industries that catered to one race or the other, but not both. Cemeteries were either black or white. Interracial dating and marriage, of course, were strictly forbidden. In public discourse and in public print, blacks were commonly denied the courtesy of personal or professional titles (Dr., Mr., Mrs., Miss). In polite company, they were called colored people or Negroes (black was then considered a derogatory term, and so was African; African-American was not in the white lexicon). The most common and hated word was nigger; only slightly less cutting was negro, uncapitalized (and pronounced nig-ra), for it was a visible and explicit denial of any status as a person. (Among the whites who persisted in the use of the lowercase n were the Vanderbilt Agrarians in their 1930 manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, and James Agee a decade later in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.)