by John Egerton
Howard Odum was to be a principal beneficiary of that progressive atmosphere. In ten years at Chapel Hill, he had parlayed his role as a Southern social critic into a prestigious entrepreneurial empire of research and publishing backed by large foundation grants. Stung by occasional heavy criticism of his progressive pronouncements in the 1920s, he had retreated somewhat into scholarly ambiguity when Frank Graham took over, but his prolific output of books and articles continued, most notably in the 1930s with An American Epoch, an impressionistic portrait of Southern folk culture, and Southern Regions of the United States, a monumental (though maddeningly disorganized) statistical analysis of the South’s assets and liabilities.
Odum saw the big picture of the South—the old and the new, the pieces and the whole—and he was widely regarded as the preeminent expert on the subject. But, particularly in comparison with Graham, who had a far greater tolerance for dissent and a talent for political infighting, the once-controversial sociologist seemed meek and moderate, if not downright conservative. Ever skeptical of political solutions to social problems, he never had much involvement with the New Deal; he even kept his distance from the Tennessee Valley Authority, where regional planning along the lines Odum had long advocated was considered a cardinal principle.
After Southern Regions appeared in 1936, Odum headed a committee to explore the feasibility of forming a permanent regional research group, and the following year he was made president of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. His long-range hope was to lead in the development of a private and independently supported comprehensive organization devoted to Southern regional planning and policy-making, and he was dismayed to see rival efforts proliferate along those same lines in the late 1930s—TVA and other New Deal initiatives, something called the Southern Policy Committee, and a curiously eclectic venture, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, which was scheduled to convene in Birmingham in November 1938. More bruising yet to Odum’s ego was his discovery that the Birmingham gathering would feature a keynote address by none other than his own president, Frank Porter Graham.
Others on the Chapel Hill campus were also active in the social arena of the South—and some, like Graham, were more adventuresome than Howard Odum. One whose youthful audacity and aggressiveness irritated Odum at times was William T. Couch, who was barely past thirty when he was named director of the UNC Press in 1932 (an appointment that actually confirmed his de facto status for the five previous years). Couch, son of a Virginia Baptist preacher, was a UNC graduate who had impressed Graham and others with his grasp of publishing and his liberal social philosophy. Before he came, the press under Louis Round Wilson had focused mainly on esoteric titles for a narrow scholarly audience; under Couch’s leadership, it tripled the annual output of new books, and a substantial proportion of them addressed contemporary political, economic, social, and racial issues.
In truth, the UNC Press was the nearest thing the South had to a general-interest book publishing company. Before W. T. Couch left to direct the University of Chicago Press in 1945, he brought about 450 titles into print; about one in ten of them were by or about blacks, and twice as many more addressed other aspects of the South and its conditions, problems, and needs. Books on sharecropping, lynching, criminal justice, labor problems, and mill towns were issued (and generally well received by critics and the reading public). Black writers Charles S. Johnson, Arthur H. Fauset, J. Saunders Redding, Horace Cayton, and Benjamin Brawley were among those who made strong contributions to the list; so did many progressive whites, including Virginius Dabney, Clarence Cason, Herman C. Nixon, and the brothers Broadus and George S. Mitchell. And of course, the authors also included several with UNC ties: Odum, Guy B. Johnson, Gerald W. Johnson, Paul Green, Rupert Vance, and Arthur Raper. Couch edited a couple of important volumes himself, and served for two years as North Carolina director of the WPA Writers’ Project and three more as the agency’s Southern regional director.
Against the pervasive Northern stereotype, whether in New York books or Hollywood films, of the Southerner as primitive beast—as wounded animal to be feared or pitied but always kept at bay—W. T. Couch and the UNC Press struggled to present a more intelligent and realistic picture of human beings deserving of attention, respect, and (sometimes) help. In this endeavor they were joined by virtually no other academic or commercial press in the South until well after World War II. Throughout Couch’s tenure, he was the only Southern book publisher interested in racial and social issues affecting the region.
When he was a young man, Couch seldom ducked an issue. One of the Agrarians snidely called him a “parlor Bolshevik.” He frequently spoke out in anger in support of striking industrial workers and against their bosses. In 1936 he came forcefully to the defense of a UNC professor under fire for having dined in an interracial group that included James W. Ford, the Communist Party’s black candidate for Vice President of the United States. Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, wanted the professor fired, but Couch and Frank Graham staved off the attack.
Howard Odum found Couch’s public actions disturbing, and he was even more concerned when Graham enlisted the press director to play a prominent role in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham. Odum and Couch were never close personally. Historian Daniel Joseph Singal described them as “two prima donna competitors vying with each other for national attention and financial support.” Ironically, though, they were very much alike in their opposition to communism, their concessions to white racial mores—and, eventually, their distrust of the radical activists who emerged from the Birmingham meeting. Despite their differences, Couch and Odum were central figures in the large and influential body of Southern wordsmiths—novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists, journalists, scholars, editors, and publishers—who sought throughout the 1930s and beyond to describe and explain what was happening to their land and their people.
9. Pens and Swords
To be candid, it is probably an overstatement to call the writers and the rest of the intelligentsia influential, though I have characterized them as such more than once in this narrative. For all their countless words of liberal attack and conservative defense, of admonition and exhortation, of analysis and interpretation and prophecy, there is not much evidence that they ever persuaded the political and religious and educational leaders, the barons of industry and the press, or the bosses of organized labor to take the South in a new direction. Nobody who had the power to lead, so far as I can tell, was truly influenced by the South’s writers to depart from the old and discredited pattern of leadership.
But homage must be paid. The word-makers left behind a body of work in the permanent record providing incontrovertible proof that someone in the South in the 1930s saw and recognized what was really wrong with the region—and, in a few rare cases, even spelled out the remedies that would eventually and inevitably be necessary. (Their legacy also included readers and students with changed perceptions and broadened visions.) To read them now, in the light of all that has happened subsequently, is to realize that the creative process is sometimes reflective of its environment, and literature—any good writing, fictional or factual—can be viewed (in retrospect, at least) as a sort of social barometer, an imprecise but revealing indicator of what is coming down the road.
When he authored Liberalism in the South in 1932, Virginius Dabney, editorial writer of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, concluded that “the press of the South equals, if indeed it does not surpass, that of any other section of the United States in forthrightness and in liberalism.” He cited as evidence of that assertion four Southern papers and their editors who had won Pulitzer Prizes in the 1920s for their attacks on lynching and the Ku Klux Klan: C. P. J. Mooney of the Memphis Commercial-Appeal; Louis I. Jaffé of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot; Grover C. Hall, Sr., of the Montgomery Advertiser; and the Columbus (Georgia) Enquirer-Sun under Julia Collier Harris and her husband, Julian Harris (son of famed folk-tale spinner Joel Chandler Har
ris). Another editorialist, Robert Lathan of the Charleston News & Courier, was also named by the Pulitzer judges for his criticism of Southern political leadership.
Dabney cited several other publishers, editors, and papers that he felt were deserving of praise for their progressiveness, including Adolph S. Ochs of the Chattanooga Times (also owner of the New York Times); editorial writers Mark Ethridge of the Macon (Georgia) Telegraph, Gerald W. Johnson of the Greensboro (North Carolina) News, and Douglas Southall Freeman of the Richmond News Leader; and the leading papers of South Carolina (the State in Columbia) and Arkansas (the Gazette in Little Rock). In the spirit of their patron social critic, H. L. Mencken, these papers and their editors had abandoned Old South romanticism and called their region to task for its failings, and Dabney heartily approved. (Curiously, the papers he criticized for being too conservative—the Charlotte Observer, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Atlanta Constitution—were later to be regarded as among the most progressive in the region.)
On into the 1930s, newspapers in the South continued to give voice to writers of a muckraking or crusading bent. The Constitution won a Pulitzer in 1931 for exposing graft in city government (Julian Harris was in on that one, too, having come up from Columbus the year before), and the paper turned more aggressive editorially later in the decade under its new editor, Ralph McGill. The Courier-Journal rose to the front rank of American newspapers under publisher Barry Bingham, whose father, Robert Worth Bingham, had taken leave to serve as President Roosevelt’s ambassador to Great Britain; editor Mark Ethridge had left Macon for the Richmond newspapers before moving on once more to Louisville, where he drew on his earlier connections to assemble a “Georgia Mafia of journalists” that included Tarleton Collier of the Atlanta Georgian and James E. Pope of the Atlanta Journal. Another publisher-turned-diplomat who left his paper in younger family hands and saw it gain stature was Josephus Daniels of the News & Observer; his son Jonathan (like Collier and numerous others, a minor novelist in his spare time) returned to Raleigh to edit the paper after his father became FDR’s ambassador to Mexico in 1933.
Still more father-to-son legacies marked the maturing of Southern journalism. The son and namesake of John Temple Graves, a turn-of-the-century editor in Atlanta, had a large following in the Roosevelt years as a syndicated columnist with the Birmingham Age-Herald; editor Grover C. Hall, Jr., of the Montgomery Advertiser was a successor to his father there, as was George Fort Milton, Jr., at the Chattanooga News; in Florida, Paul Poynter’s son Nelson took over the reins of the St. Petersburg Times.
Also in the 1930s, papers in Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Miami showed encouraging signs of growth and maturity. In Nashville, Silliman Evans, a New Deal liberal from Texas, took over as publisher of the morning Tennessean. Hodding Carter, a hard-hitting reformer from Louisiana, started a progressive tradition at the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi. Another Menckenite, W. J. Cash of the Charlotte News and other papers, worked for most of the decade on his singular volume of regional interpretation, The Mind of the South.
Often, even the journalists who left their native turf made contributions that reflected well on the quality of the region’s papers. Among those who went north to sparkling careers were Arthur Krock of the Courier-Journal and Turner Catledge of the Commercial-Appeal in Memphis, both of whom ended up at the New York Times—Catledge by way of the Baltimore Sun. Gerald W. Johnson left the Greensboro paper to work for Howard Odum at Chapel Hill, and then joined Mencken at the Sun. The younger George Milton wrote history and biography on the side, before and after his Chattanooga days. Douglas Southall Freeman stayed at the Richmond News Leader until he retired, but gained national fame as a Civil War historian; he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1935 for his definitive four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee.
Virginius Dabney stayed in Richmond, too, and by the mid-1930s he was editor of the Times-Dispatch, a post he would hold for almost thirty-five years. Identified as he was with the philosophy of liberalism even before the New Deal began, Dabney was one of the most prominent figures on the long and impressive list of notable Southern journalists of the thirties. In the later years of his career, the rush of events left him stranded in the rearguard ranks of conservative resistance, but through most of the Roosevelt era he was something of a symbol of progressive opinion in the region.
As yellow-dog Democrats in the one-party South, the editors and publishers of the region’s major daily newspapers may have seemed more liberal than they really were. Almost all of them endorsed Roosevelt four times, while a solid majority of their Northern counterparts remained steadfastly Republican. But beyond their knee-jerk party partisanship and their lingering tendency to regard Yankees with defensive suspicion, the Southern journalists as a group did tend to be a little to the left of center on many public issues. Virginius Dabney’s background and his evolving editorial profile put him in close company with almost all of his regional contemporaries; his views and actions prior to World War II cast revealing light on the strengths and weaknesses of Southern liberalism in those years.
Dabney was an “old family” Southerner with living elders who had endured the suffering of the Civil War; he had a classical education (at the University of Virginia, where his father taught history); his responsibility at the paper was for opinion, not news, and for him and his able assistants, the ambience was reflective, almost leisurely; at home, he had a dutiful wife and loyal black servants to relieve him of most family and domestic duties, and even his religious obligations could be met with a certain Episcopalian detachment. It was Dabney’s good fortune to be almost entirely free, from the very beginning of his career, to focus intently on an intellectual life of writing, reading, and conversation, and he, like most of his journalistic fellows of the same station, made the most of it. (I cite these conditions not to be judgmental about the exalted status of editors in that less frenetic time, but to try to explain how they could turn out as much copy as they did.) Not only did Dabney and many other editors write editorials and columns almost every day; they also wrote authoritative volumes of history and current affairs, articles for some of the leading national magazines of the day, an abundance of correspondence, and even some works of fiction. In those days, when letter-writing was a widely practiced art not yet atrophied by long-distance telephoning, and reading was not yet threatened by television, the prodigious output of the journalists was not considered extraordinary.
Dabney seemed to come quite naturally to his personal brand of enlightened progressivism. The women’s suffrage fight had been won, and he was glad of it; the pro-evolution/anti-fundamentalism battle, highlighted by the Scopes trial, had shifted public opinion in a more liberal direction, and he was glad of that, too. Baptized in Mencken’s acidic ink, he had a reputation as a Southern realist, a member of the intellectual elite, and an incisive social critic. He supported Al Smith in 1928, favored the repeal of Prohibition, and denounced the verdicts against the Scottsboro boys in Alabama and Angelo Herndon in Atlanta. In his paper no less than in his personal associations, he was unfailingly courteous to blacks; they were Mr. or Mrs. or Dr. to him, and they were Negroes with a capital N, which was considered quite liberal and advanced for a Southern newspaper. The struggling black press in the South, made up almost entirely of small-circulation weeklies, looked to white editors like Dabney with a certain respect and envy, and in a small way he returned the compliment, cultivating a professional relationship with such men as P. B. Young, who had founded the Norfolk Journal & Guide in 1910 and would remain its editor and publisher until after World War II.
Dabney endorsed the right of workers to organize unions, scorned the Republicans as the party of wealth and privilege, and defended the free-speech rights of Communists and other radical activists; when critics painted him pink, he seemed more amused than disturbed. Beyond all that, he also regularly and forcefully expressed his editorial disgust with lynching and the Klan, and he gave strong support to the anti-poll-tax and anti-ly
nching movements. Even Walter White of the NAACP was impressed; in 1937 he mounted a personal campaign—unsuccessful, as it turned out—to get for Dabney the Pulitzer Prize. (The award did finally come to him in 1948.)
Because of his prominence as a spokesman for progressive change in the South, Virginius Dabney hoped for—even, it seems fair to say, expected—the gratitude of blacks and others in distress. As he saw it, he represented an enlightened class of whites who were the Negro’s best friends, and he wanted them to show their appreciation by waiting patiently and politely for gradual improvements in their status. The white South, he believed, would have to be allowed time to solve its own problems; even lynching and the poll tax could best be eliminated by state, not federal, action. Communist agitation of the black masses and laboring whites worried him, and he stayed away from the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham in 1938 to avoid association with such political radicals. For all his liberalism, Dabney had no serious quarrel with Jim Crow segregation, but only with its demeaning and patently unequal aspects. When the impulse for reform finally caught up with him, he proved to be a cautious and restrained moderate, and as the currents of political and social activism slowly began to gather speed in the late 1930s, he was distressed to discover that moderation and gradualism in the quest for democratic equality would not be enough to see him through.
In the atmosphere of ferment that the New Deal spawned and that elements of the church, the university, and the press gingerly nourished, the South also gained notice in magazines and books that rode the new wave of literary realism. While Hollywood continued to feed on the stereotypical myths of the Old South, novels and documentary books of nonfiction made a significant shift toward hard reality. (Gone With the Wind was a gigantic exception, of course—a romance novel that the movies ballooned into a phenomenon of cultural immortality.)