TO LIVE AND DINE IN DIXIE

290 Pages·2011·1.1 MB·English

TO LIVE AND DINE IN DIXIE:
FOODWAYS AND CULTURE IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOUTH

by
ANGELA JILL COOLEY
KARI FREDERICKSON, COMMITTEE CHAIR
GEORGE C. RABLE
LISA LINDQUIST-DORR
JOHN M. GIGGIE
GRACE ELIZABETH HALE

A DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Department of History
in the Graduate School of
The University of Alabama

TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA

2011
Copyright Angela Jill Cooley 2011
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ABSTRACT
This dissertation explores the transformation of food culture in urban areas of the
American South during the first part of the twentieth century. From 1900 to 1964, southern
culinary practices became more public and more in line with national trends. The first three
decades of the twentieth century marked an important period of change. In southern homes,
white, middle-class, urban women formed a commitment to scientific cooking and used its strict
rules to construct new racial and class identities within the urban environment. At the same time,
newly urban peoples began frequenting a variety of different types of public eating places.
Socio-economic, racial, ethnic, and gender diversity within these spaces encouraged the white
power structure in southern cities to implement laws to regulate these public spaces. Such
regulation included municipal ordinances that restricted eating places based on race and
contributing to the development of a system of racial segregation within the region’s urban areas.
White southerners maintained racial segregation in public eating places through images
and everyday rituals that identified the black consumption of food as subordinate to white
consumption. At the height of Jim Crow, however, southern consumption culture also cultivated
the seeds of segregation’s destruction. Segregated black cafes stimulated African American
community building and empowerment, both of which served to undermine the strength of
segregation. At the same time, as southern food practices became more entwined with national
standards, food systems emerged and spread across the South that encouraged more
democratized spaces for the consumption of food. The nationalization of southern food culture,
the determined efforts of civil rights activists to end segregated eating patterns, and the continued
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intransigence of white supremacists to maintain racial segregation in food venues encouraged the
United States Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which, among other things,
required the desegregation of public eating places.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I appreciate the many institutions that have provided financial support. The History
Department at the University of Alabama offered many years of assistance through fellowships,
assistantships, Honor’s Day awards, travel funds, and adjunct teaching positions. The Graduate
School provided travel funds to attend conferences and financed my first year of work on this
dissertation with a Graduate Council fellowship. The Bankhead family and the Teaching
American History Program funded grants that allowed me to pursue a Ph.D. and to gain valuable
research and teaching experience. In particular, I would like to thank Kari Frederickson, ZuZu
Freyer, and Lisa Lindquist-Dorr for selecting me to participate in these programs. The Clements
Library at the University of Michigan assisted with travel funds to review their excellent culinary
collection in Ann Arbor. The Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of
Montevallo offered adjunct teaching opportunities that provided funding and broadened my
teaching repertoire. I am indebted to James S. Day, Clark E. Hultquist, Ruth Truss, Amanda Fox,
and Stacia Love for their assistance and support during my time at Montevallo.
I am also indebted to many institutions and individuals for their help in the research and
writing of this dissertation. The Interlibrary Loan librarians at Gorgas Library at the University
of Alabama facilitated the acquisition of many important resources. Lee E. Pike at the Angelo
Bruno Business Library at the University of Alabama located and requested certain business
records. I want to thank John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, for providing
research help, positive feedback on my work, and, along with Ted Ownby, the incentive to bring
this dissertation to a conclusion. I am grateful to committee members Kari Frederickson, George
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C. Rable, Lisa Lindquist-Dorr, John M. Giggie, and Grace Elizabeth Hale for their close reading
of this dissertation and their valuable suggestions on how to improve my work. In particular, Dr.
Frederickson, Dr. Rable, and Dr. Lindquist-Dorr have been an important part of my education
from my first day in graduate school. I want to thank them for shepherding me through the
demanding process of becoming a historian. I have also received the support and encouragement
of many faculty, staff members, and students at the University of Alabama, but I want to
recognize Kay Branyon, Fay Wheat, and Ellen Moon in the History Department office because
they have always been helpful, knowledgeable, and cheerful.
The most important people in my life are my family. I thank my siblings, niece, nephew,
grandmother, and extended family for the innumerable ways that they have demonstrated their
love and support over the years. To my parents, however, I extend my most genuine appreciation
for providing me with food, shelter, assistance, advice (solicited and otherwise), and, above all,
unconditional love. I thank my mother for helping to proofread this dissertation. I thank my
father for his immortal words of wisdom, “Study hard, study good,” which my entire family has
now taken to heart. I also want to thank Jon. I am sure that he has tired of listening to me provide
a cultural analysis of every meal we have eaten since I started this dissertation, but I appreciate
his friendship, advice, and love.

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CONTENTS

ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………...…...……….……….ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………..….………………….iv

INTRODUCTION: Steaming Fried Chicken and Other “Sacrilege”: Food Practices in the
Twentieth-Century South.…………………………………………………………………..….….1

CHAPTER ONE: New South, New Food: Transforming Southern Food Culture........................20

CHAPTER TWO: “Autocrats of [the] Dinner Table”: The White Southern Middle Class and
Restaurant Culture………………………………………………………….................................60

CHAPTER THREE: “A First-Class Lunch in Every Respect”: Cafes, Lunch Rooms, and Public
Eating Places as Sites of Cultural Conflict…………………………………………..............…105

CHAPTER FOUR: Eating Jim Crow: African American Eating Practices in the Twentieth-
Century South……………………………………………………………………………….….150

CHAPTER FIVE: Making the McSouth: Southern Foodways in National Culture……….…..192

CHAPTER SIX: “The Customer is Always ‘White’”: Racial Purity and the Civil Rights
Movement………………………………………………………………………………………228

CONCLUSION: Cooking up Controversy: Contemporary Discourses on Southern
Foodways……………………………………………………………………………………….258

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………267

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INTRODUCTION: Steaming Fried Chicken and Other “Sacrilege”:
Food Practices in the Twentieth-Century South

In 1955, Mary R. Wheeler of Waynesboro, Virginia, wrote an angry letter to the editor of
Life magazine complaining that the southern fried chicken recipe included in an earlier issue was
not “authentic.” The recipe in question instructed readers to simmer the chicken in water for
thirty minutes before serving. One word summed up Wheeler’s reaction to the notion of
steaming fried chicken: “sacrilege.” The editor responded to Wheeler’s complaint by assuring its
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readers, “Life’s fried chicken, the specialty of a real southern cook, is both authentic and crisp.”
Wheeler’s concern that the national magazine might misrepresent a dish as important to the
southern consciousness as fried chicken symbolizes a broader concern about the effect of an
increasingly national culture on ways of life deemed to be particularly southern.
Food culture offers a good vehicle for examining this phenomenon because food has, and
has always had, a proprietary nature. Like Wheeler, individual cooks take ownership over dishes
that can be prepared in a variety of ways and adopt one method of preparation that is considered
to be proper. Individual restaurants, although preparing and serving essentially the same menu as
their competitors, mark their own dishes and recipes as special and exclusive. Localities, states,
regions, even nations lay claim to foods, recipes, and drinks as “traditional” dishes impervious to
the vagaries of time or fashion.

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“Recipes that Generations of Cooks Have Sworn By,” Life, January 3, 1955, 65; Mary
R. Wheeler, letter to the editor, Life, January 24, 1955, 8.
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Foodways, however, are not so unyielding. Practices associated with the provision,
preparation, service, and consumption of food tend to change along with society, culture,
economics, technology, and consumer tastes, to name only a few factors. Depending upon her
age, Wheeler may have witnessed significant changes in food practices even in the small
Shenandoah community of Waynesboro. The first half of the twentieth century represented a
significant period of change in the ways that southerners obtained, cooked, consumed, and
thought about the foods they ate. In many ways, these changes reflected broader technological,
economic, political, social, and cultural shifts. Both Wheeler’s willingness to consult Life
magazine for recipes and her disdain that the national periodical botched this regional specialty
reflects a similar tendency among the broader southern populace to accept the convenience
represented by more nationalized modes of consumption and sustenance and, at the same time,
reject changing food consumer practices as antithetical to traditional southern mores.
This dissertation explores the evolution of southern food culture from 1900 to 1964.
During this period, southern food practices became progressively more public in nature and
increasingly more in line with national norms. As national standards permeated southern
foodways, by way of consumer products, national advertising, scientific cookery, public eating
places, and chain restaurants, southerners responded with a mixture of eager acceptance, wary
application, and determined intransigence, depending upon the circumstances. At its best, some
southerners recognized that more modern foodways offered convenience, luxury, and
participation in a more national culture. Southerners who lived in cities and had financial means,
particularly whites, used their access to these new foodways to help identify themselves as part
of a growing, national, white middle class. At the same time, however, many white southerners
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interpreted some features of these changes as threats to the region’s racial, class, and gender
hierarchies.
The first three chapters in this dissertation examine the important changes related to
foodways that took place in southern cities from the turn of the twentieth century through the
1920s and how these changes contributed to the formation of a system of racial segregation in
the South. The last three chapters explore southern food practices from the Great Depression
through the civil rights movement and consider how the continued modernization and
nationalization of food consumption contributed to the dismantling of this system. For purposes
of this dissertation, the South includes the eleven former Confederate states plus the border states
of Maryland, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Kentucky (which roughly corresponds, by the way,
to the states in which a restaurant patron can order a glass of sweet tea). This study, however, is
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most concerned with the urban areas within this region. Granted, within this vast terrain, many
sub-regional and local culinary traditions thrived. This dissertation is less concerned with the
actual foods consumed in these areas than in the manners, rituals, and regulations associated with
the provision, preparation, cooking, service, and consumption of foods in the American South. A
general analysis of such culinary practices in the urban areas of the region provides insight into
the region’s broader social, cultural, legal, and economic circumstances.

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Scholars can debate what constitutes an urban area. David Goldfield uses a definition
that relates primarily to population and includes as “urban” towns with fewer than 5,000
inhabitants (in 1910). Cities would be somewhat larger than that with “small” cities possessing
from 5,000 to 15,000 residents (in 1910). David Goldfield, Region, Race, and Cities:
Interpreting the Urban South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 41. I also
use the term “urban” more broadly, although with no precise definition. Most of this research is
based on the situations of Atlanta and Birmingham which, according to Don H. Doyle, were the
second and third largest southern cities, respectively, (behind New Orleans) in 1910. Don H.
Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860-1910
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 15. Based on less extensive research in
other southern cities, such as Richmond, Louisville, Savannah, Montgomery, and Galveston,
similar practices seem to have been common across the South.
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