Recovering the Piedmont Past, Volume 2: Bridging the Centuries in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1877-1941 PDF
Preview Recovering the Piedmont Past, Volume 2: Bridging the Centuries in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1877-1941
Recovering the Piedmont Past, Volume 2 Recovering the Piedmont Past, Volume 2 Bridging the Centuries in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1877‒1941 Edited by Timothy P. Grady and Andrew H. Myers Foreword by Melissa Walker The University of South Carolina Press © 2019 University of South Carolina Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208 www.sc.edu/uscpress 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/. ISBN 978-1-61117-922-4 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-61117-923-1 (ebook) Front cover photograph: Main St., Greenville, South Carolina, c. 1902, courtesy of the Greenville County Library System Contents Foreword The New South’s Encounters with the Nation and the World— Insights from the South Carolina Upcountry vii Melissa Walker Introduction 1 Andrew H. Myers and Timothy P. Grady The Circus Is Coming to Town The Golden Age of the Circus in the South Carolina Upcountry 6 Timothy P. Grady Booker T. Washington, Spartanburg, and the Cherokee Springs Hotel 20 Andrew H. Myers “Paternalism run mad” The Subtreasury Debate, Ben Tillman, and the Farmers’ Alliance in the South Carolina Upcountry 38 Kevin Krause The Scourge of the South Pellagra and Poverty in Spartanburg’s Mill Villages 58 Diane C. Vecchio “Oh, my God, prosper this work” William Plumer Jacobs and the Thornwell Orphanage 72 Nancy Snell Griffith “Better Babies” Dr. Daniel Lesesne Smith, His Baby Hospitals, and the Southern Pediatric Seminar 91 Alexia Jones Helsley From Sparta to Spartanburg The Experience of Greek Americans in Spartanburg, South Carolina 113 Catherine G. Canino vi Contents Robert Quillen An Upcountry Apostle for Small-Town Life 134 Marvin L. Cann “Crazed mystic in the White House” W. P. Beard, White Supremacy, and Opposition to World War I 145 Robert B. McCormick From Fifth Avenue to the Dark Corner The New York National Guard in Glassy Mountain Township, 1917–18 162 Jonathan K. Brooke New Deal Communities Table Rock State Park, Pickens County, and the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression 178 Christopher M. Bishop Notes 199 Contributors 251 Index 253 Foreword The New South’s Encounters with the Nation and the World—Insights from the South Carolina Upcountry Melissa Walker In 1886 the Atlanta Constitution’s managing editor Henry W. Grady delivered an address to the New England Club of New York City. He told the assembled business and political leaders that a “new South” had emerged, a South that em- braced a diverse economy and racial moderation. Rising out of the ashes of the old South, which “rested everything on slavery and agriculture, unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth,” Grady proclaimed, a new South was “enamored of her new work.” That new work was nothing short of a complete modernization of the southern economy and social system. According to Henry Grady and other boosters, the South would soon take her place in the American mainstream. Grady became known as one of the leading advocates of a “New South” that, bolstered by northern investment in the South’s growing industrial economy, would achieve a full reintegration with the nation.1 Historians have dubbed the period of southern history from the end of Reconstruction through World War II as “the New South” period. During this time southern farmers suffered grinding poverty born of volatile cotton prices, a scarcity of credit, and the rising costs of agricultural inputs and marketing. Southern leaders sought to relieve agricultural woes by recruiting industry to the region. The South also had shifts in local and state leadership during this period. Although the old planter class maintained much of its influence over southern states, economic and political leadership gradually shifted from rural to urban areas, and a new middle class of entrepreneurs, newspapermen, and businessmen emerged as the region’s most influential men. The New South became increas- ingly linked to national and international markets and transportation networks.2 Historians have spilled buckets of ink evaluating just how new this “New South” was. The historian Edward Ayers wrote, “The New South appears far newer when we measure change by paying close attention to concrete differences in people’s lives instead of contrasting the region with the North’s more fortunate viii Melissa Walker history or the claims of Southern boosters.” The essays in this volume bear out Ayers’s assertion. While many elements of life in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Carolina upcountry echoed long-standing themes, old concerns played out in new ways, and many profound changes occurred. This book, the second collection inspired by Timothy P. Grady’s vision that examining unexplored moments in local history in light of the larger historiography can pro- vide us with new and more complex insights into the southern past, proves that there is much more to learn about the New South. Ayers said that “the history of the New South was . . . a history of continual redefinition and renegotiation, of unintended and unanticipated consequences, [and] of unresolved tensions.” The essays in this volume demonstrate the complexity that Ayers described, some- times confirming and sometimes overturning our notions about life in the South after redemption. A number of themes emerge.3 Of course, race is the most persistent theme in southern history. From the time of European contact and the opening of the Atlantic slave trade to the pres- ent time, contests over the meaning of race have shaped southern society. Nu- merous historians have illuminated the ways that white supremacy was reinforced during the New South period and in particular the extent to which concerns about race shaped reforms during the Progressive Era. After 1877 federal efforts to manage race relations in the South effectively ended, and the region’s whites set about to restore white supremacy and white control of the political order in southern states. Over the next twenty-five years, a series of legal maneuvers and social practices reinforced by racial violence stripped African Americans of politi- cal and economic rights. These essays affirm the extent to which racial boundaries remained a central preoccupation for whites in the South Carolina upcountry and survey the many settings in which concerns about the meaning of race could play out. For ex- ample, Catherine G. Canino shows how Greek immigrants’ efforts to assimilate took place in the context of Ku Klux Klan campaigns against newcomers from southern and eastern Europe. Greek immigrants sought to prove they were eth- nically white and assimilated to such a degree that white leaders openly praised them as model citizens. Timothy P. Grady demonstrates that circuses, symbols of modern forms of mass entertainment, also became a battlefield on which racial conflicts were fought. Andrew H. Myers explores the evolution of racial views in Spartanburg County as Jim Crow segregation became entrenched and racial tensions escalated throughout the South. Robert B. McCormick introduces us to William P. Beard, an outspokenly racist Abbeville newspaper editor whose World War I‒era pro-German sentiments were rooted in multiple types of racial anxi- eties. Beard believed that allying with France and Britain, two nations that relied in part on “mongrel” colonial forces to fight Germany, posed a threat to white supremacy around the world, and he feared that at home war-time service would bring African Americans closer to full citizenship. Foreword ix Another theme that is evident in these essays is the influence of religion in the New South. Evangelicalism was a growing force in the New South, and in spite of the segregation of churches and variations in worship practices, blacks and whites shared many Protestant beliefs. Churches exerted a strong influence over daily life in the New South, and religious concerns shaped many of the re- forms of the Progressive Era. Whether it was in shaping rules of behavior at the circus or molding the pioneering approach to caring for orphans advanced by William Plumer Jacobs, evangelical churches wielded strong influence on life in the upcountry during the New South years.4 The case of Jacobs and the Thornwell orphanage offers one example of the preoccupation with modernization in the upcountry. Drawing on social-gospel ideas that Christians had an obligation to go beyond gaining converts and care for the material needs of people in their midst, a notion that gained steam in Eu- rope and in the North during the Progressive Era, Jacobs rejected impersonal in- stitutional approaches to caring for orphaned children. In her essay Nancy Snell Griffith shows how Jacobs fashioned a new type of orphanage, one modeled on those founded by German reformers that sought to re-create the nuclear family. He also adopted modern methods of ensuring funding for his orphanage, insist- ing on seeking national benefactors and establishing an endowment. Diane C. Vecchio and Alexia Jones Helsley explore similar concern with modernization evident in the work of public health reformers who sought to address the scourge of pellagra and to improve pediatric health in the upcountry. As these studies demonstrate, folks in the upcountry shared the faith in scientific expertise that characterized national Progressive reforms, and they sought out that expertise from places as distant as Europe. The early twentieth-century South is often portrayed as an insular and parochial place, but as Canino demonstrates with Spartanburg’s Greek commu- nity, even outsiders could find a home in the New South upcountry, and those outsiders often came to exercise considerable influence over local life. Marvin L. Cann explores the life and work of Robert Quillen, a Kansas native who became a Fountain Inn newspaper publisher and editor as well as a columnist for national publications. Quillen embodied the conflicted relationship many upcountry resi- dents had with a modernizing society. He extolled the virtues of small-town life but also rejected many traditional small-town values. Quillen did not practice evangelical Christianity, and he was openly critical of religious hypocrisy that he observed among many of his neighbors. He was also critical of the excessive influence wielded by many of Fountain Inn’s leading citizens. Some of the essays in this volume explore the myriad ways that upcountry residents negotiated their relationships with the nation as a whole. Southerners often feared that the embrace of federal government aid would be a slippery slope to a resumption of federal intervention in the region’s race relations, but these es- says demonstrate that southerners did not reject all forms of federal intervention
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