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During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. It was also a battlefield on which forces for and against social change were starting to form. For a white southern liberal like Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, it was a fascinating moment to explore. Attuned to culture as well as politics, Daniels knew the true South lay somewhere between Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. On May 5, 1937, he set out to find it, driving thousands of miles in his trusty Plymouth and ultimately interviewing even Mitchell herself. In Discovering the South historian Jennifer Ritterhouse pieces together Daniels's unpublished notes from his tour along with his published writings and a wealth of archival evidence to put this one man's journey through a South in transition into a larger context. Daniels's well chosen itinerary brought him face to face with the full range of political and cultural possibilities in the South of the 1930s, from New Deal liberalism and social planning in the Tennessee Valley Authority, to Communist agitation in the Scottsboro case, to planters' and industrialists' reactionary worldview and repressive violence. The result is a lively narrative of black and white southerners fighting for and against democratic social change at the start of the nation's long civil rights era. For more information on this book, see www.discoveringthesouth.org.
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Keywords
- A Southerner Discovers the South
- Black & Asian studies
- Chapel Hill Regionalists
- Charles F. DeBardeleben
- debt peonage
- Delta Cooperative Farm
- Depression-era South
- Dicksonia plantation
- documentary expression in the 1930s
- Donald Davidson
- ethnic studies
- Franklin Roosevelt and the "no. 1 economic problem"
- H. L. Mitchell
- History
- History of the Americas
- Humanities
- Jonathan Daniels
- Jonathan Worth Daniels
- labor conflict in Birmingham
- long civil rights movement
- Lowndes County, Alabama
- Margaret Mitchell
- Nashville Agrarians
- race relations in the 1930s
- Regional & national history
- Scottsboro case
- Social groups
- Society & culture: general
- Society & Social Sciences
- South in the Great Depression
- southern liberalism
- Southern Policy Association
- Southern Tenant Farmers Union
- Tennessee Valley Authority
- thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBS Social groups, communities and identities::JBSL Ethnic studies
- thema EDItEUR::N History and Archaeology::NH History::NHK History of the Americas
- Willie Sue Blagden
Links
DOI: 10.5149/9781469630953_RitterhouseEditions