Recipe Excerpts from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook
Praise for The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook
"The Lee Bros. have written the classic Southern cookbook. They write with flair, brilliance, and hilarious commentary on the recipes, customs, and eccentricities of the South they celebrate with such passion. Their recipes are so good that I believe cookbook writers like the Lee Bros. may turn Southern cooking into an actual cuisine." --
Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides
"I'm a bag fan of that particular brand of Southern poetry and smarts that make up the Lee Bros.' contributions--the best food pieces I read in the Wednesday New York Times each week--so I attacked Matt and Ted's new book like a hungry wolf. I found the same genius and eye for a good story, as well as simple-to-make recipes of the new exotic cooking of the American South. These recipes make my mouth water, and the prose makes my eyes well up for its beauty, simplicity, and truth." --
Mario Batali, chef/owner, Babbo restaurant
"These guys can cook! Just reading the recipes makes me ravenous for scintillating Southern dishes. Sign me up for Tuesday Fried Chicken and Sweet Potato Buttermilk Pie!" --
Bobby Flay, chef/owner, Mesa Grill, BOLO, and Bar Americain
"The brothers Lee chronicle a South unbound by geography. They celebrate a people loosed from the burden of history but still mindful of the ties that bind. In the Lee South, boiled peanuts and edamame play well together. So do black and white, young and old, native and outlander. You'll feel welcome here." --
John T. Edge, author of Southern Belly: the Ultimate Food Lover's Companion to the South
"The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook makes me daydream of a long ago summer on a Pawleys Island back porch, the aroma of the marsh and the dinner table mingling with laughter of many generations of families and a few too many glasses of wine. Oh to the magic of being at table together in the South." --
Frank Stitt, author of Frank Stitt's Southern Table
"The wit and enthusiasm of the Lee Bros. is irresistible, as are the recipes--a mix of traditional Southern classics and unique, highly individual creations--which will have you reaching for your cast- iron (or stainless steel) skillet." --
Scott Peacock, author of The Gift of Southern Cooking
Book Description
You don't have to be southern to cook southern.
From the New York Times food writers who defended lard and demystified gumbo comes a collection of exceptional southern recipes for everyday cooks. The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook tells the story of the brothers' culinary coming-of-age in Charleston—how they triumphed over their northern roots and learned to cook southern without a southern grandmother. Here are recipes for classics like Fried Chicken, Crab Cakes, and Pecan Pie, as well as little-known preparations such as St. Cecilia Punch, Pickled Peaches, and Shrimp Burgers. Others bear the hallmark of the brothers' resourceful cooking style—simple, sophisticated dishes like Blackened Potato Salad, Saigon Hoppin' John, and Buttermilk-Sweet Potato Pie that usher southern cooking into the twenty-first century without losing sight of its roots. With helpful sourcing and substitution tips, this is a practical and personal guide that will have readers cooking southern tonight, wherever they live. 32 pages of full-color photographs of the recipes; fifty b/w photographs from the Lee Bros.' travels throughout the South.
Customer Reviews:
Charleston...The cradle of gentility.......2007-10-10
I am pleased with this book and especially proud of the Lee bros. As a Charleston and environs resident in the 70's I learned to appreciate stories and writing efforts such as this. I can only tell you that I am thoroughly taken with the effort.
Passionate Southern cooking.......2007-10-08
I read this cookbook cover-to-cover. It's very conversational, with great stories and a deep love for Southern food. It's huge! Over 500 pages of recipes from drinks and appetizers to desserts. There are many references to Internet food stores, and I bookmarked many while I read.
This cookbook turned me on to several Southern foods I didn't know, like Boiled Peanuts (like soy beans), Scuppernong Preserves (a grape) and Sorghum Molasses.
The first recipe I made was Corn Cob Wine - corn cobs, yeast and sugar fermented several weeks into an off-beat fruity moonshine. I just made the Sweet Potato Buttermilk Pie - a tangy, bright version of the classic. All the recipes look terrific.
Overall, I highly recommend this cookbook for any Southern collection.
not my kind of southern.......2007-10-08
This is a large book that has some good stories in it, but I live in the south and expected a different kind of book, maybe like a paula deen book. This is not it. This is too fancy for me. I love to bake but not too crazy about cooking in general so I am fairly comfortable in the kitchen. This book is more for those who entertain a lot and need meals that are more over the top. It also has some form of liquor in almost every recipe and since I don't drink and don't prepare meals with liquor, most of the recipes didn't appeal to me. If you like bon appetit magazine then this is the book for you. I prefer more like Taste of Home. Good book but just not for me.
Not what I imagined.......2007-10-04
I liked the book but did not love it. The many many recipes for all the broth were overkill. I made the biscuits and they did not WOW me.
I don't like boiled peanuts and cheese straws are not enough for this book.
Sorry to be against the majority but this one got returned.
terrific read - great writing.......2007-09-30
I based my purchase on others opinions and I am glad that I did. I have not attempted to re-create any recipes because reading the book itself is such a delight. I am looking forward to doing some of the preserving and found such inspiration from this.
Book Description
While the landmarks of the civil rights movement have become indelible parts of our collective memory, few have written about what life was like for white southerners who lived through that historic time. Now, in his brilliant debut book, historian Jason Sokol explores the untold stories of ordinary people experiencing the tumultuous decades that forever altered the American landscape. So often historical accounts of the era have focused on the movement’s most dramatic moments and figures, and paid greatest attention to the brave steps taken by blacks to effect long-awaited change. In this riveting book, Sokol goes beyond the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the 1960 student sit-ins, and the soul-stirring speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., and into the lives of middle- and working-class whites whose world was becoming unrecognizable to them. He takes us to New Orleans’s Ninth Ward, where, in 1960, a painful episode of school integration brought out the fiercest prejudices in some and made accidental radicals of others; to Ollie’s Barbecue in Birmingham and Pickrick Fried Chicken in Atlanta, and thousands of lunch counters in between, where “some white employees greeted black customers as though they had been patrons for years; others slammed doors in their faces; still more served them hesitantly and reluctantly.”
There Goes My Everything traces the origins of the civil rights struggle from World War II, when some black and white American soldiers lived and fought side by side overseas (leading them to question Jim Crow at home), to the beginnings of change in the 1950s and the flared tensions of the 1960s, into the 1970s, when strongholds of white rule suddenly found themselves overtaken by rising black political power. Through it all, Sokol resists the easy categorization of whites caught in the torrent of change; rather, he gives us nuanced portraits of people resisting, embracing, and questioning the social revolution taking place around them. Drawing on recorded interviews, magazine bureau dispatches, and newspaper editorials, Sokol seamlessly weaves together historical analysis with firsthand accounts. Here are the stories of white southerners in their own words, presented without condescension or moral judgment.
An unprecedented picture of one of the historic periods in twentieth-century America.
Customer Reviews:
Whites 'n' rights.......2007-08-23
There's a lot to admire in Jason Sokol's "There Goes My Everything," but also a good deal to regret.
The idea was excellent. Why should history always be written by the victors? The civil rights movement in the South threw up many fascinating personalities and served up many dramatic incidents. Since, as Sokol says, it was done by black people, with whites almost helpless observers, the retellings naturally concentrate on the main actors.
There are many more and thicker biographies of Martin Luther King Jr. than of Ross Barnett.
But although southern whites may have been helpless against a tide of history -- Sokol's view, not mine -- they were not only passive actors. Even when they were, they went through mental changes -- conniption fits, many times -- that have an interest all their own.
Sokol set out to interview surviving actors, both converts to integration and diehard segregationists; and to ransack the archives for contemporary journalism, essays, reports by do-gooders etc. This is a dissertation for a degree in history, and it reads like it. Not much verve but plenty of detail.
To sum 400 pages in a sentence, Sokol found that the South was never of one mind about civil rights. No kiddin'!
Sokol's approach is somewhat loose-jointed, although chapters embrace themes. The best is the one on schools, but it also raises the most troubling conceptual problem for Sokol's thesis, which is that racism was both widespread and deep in the South.
Most people, most Southerners accept that it was deep, but events, including many compiled here, bring that into question. Racism was in the South's face because it was enacted into law -- rather late, too. Jim Crow took a long time to grow up. So, why did the racial system crumble so quickly?
Sokol does not give much background, but he does note that in 1948, Henry A. Wallace's run for the presidency comprised a biracial strategy in the South. "Wallace's efforts failed in the end, although his campaign showed that some southerners might oppose segregation if given a viable forum in which to do so."
For historical reasons, the South was a one-party region. Sokol never really takes on the issue of how much racism was at the service of politics, rather than the other way around, although in a remark or two he does indicate that he is aware of the question.
So, can a structure that is built on deep foundations be brought down by a moderate storm? As Sokol himself says, many -- in fact, the majority -- of southern places adopted and adapted to civil rights without storm and stress. A few incidents gave the lead to the many. Can indifference to skin color be racism? Can racists be indifferent to skin color?
It would not be hard to pick up a daily newspaper in 2007 and find examples of far more enduring racism elsewhere. When a memorial to those who gave their lives for civil rights in the South was proposed, only about three dozen names were collected; and the collectors could hardly be charged with trepidation. Why did the South resist so mildly?
Sokol doesn't ask the question, but he answers it in a way. Most whites were at bottom indifferent to race, as compared with, say, keeping schools open. They may have said they were segregationists, and as long as they didn't have to choose between segregation and something else, they were. But when blacks (and their white accomplices, of whom I was one back in the '60s) made them choose, segregation usually fell behind.
It certainly makes it difficult for a historian when his target will not hold still, but Sokol is good at switching back and forth.
The switching also contributes to the book's irritating repetitiveness. If Sokol wrote, "Of those white southerners who came to accept integration, more were repulsed by segregationist violence than attracted to civil rights demonstrations," he wrote it 20 times. And, again, why were they not attracted to violence in the `50s and `60s? They had lived with lynchings for a long time.
The chapter on "The Contours of Political and Economic Change" is Sokol's weakest. The economic argument would have benefited from some numbers. Also, it is more than questionable whether the decline of tenant farming had much to do with black assertiveness. The decline arrived in many places long before civil rights agitation did. See, for example, my review of a rare book by an actual white tenant farmer, "Throwed Away" by Linda Flowers.
I have other knocks against this otherwise interesting book, but I will mention just one more.
There is not a word about music, other than references to "We Shall Overcome." Sokol mentions, briefly, how sports led to interracial commonality. But submitting to an organization that has been integrated by somebody else is a far different thing from going up to the window as a private individual and buying a ticket to the James Brown review. I knew quite a number of southern white boys (but few girls) who got integrated that way.
Absolutely Incredible - a must read!.......2007-05-15
Jason Sokol, in his first book, has given us a picture that most academic historians of the Civil Rights have not evaluated - the response of the people that had been the oppressors for hundreds of years in the Southern United States.
So many traditional histories of the Civil Rights Struggle focus on dynamic personalities like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, or Malcolm X. Many others look strictly at the legal aspects of key Supreme Court decisions such as Brown vs. the Board of Education. Yet others study the growth of "Black Power".
Sokol has taken all of these and evaluated them from a different perspective - how the oppressors became equal to the oppressed. It is a lively and original study based largely on primary materials including oral interviews of participants, legal documents, and contemporary newspapers.
I found such tidbits as the white-on-white violence and the comparison of those whites acquiescing to or supporting full integration to Communists to be fascinating stories in and of themselves. When combined with the legal fights waged by people such as Ollie McClung and the inadvertent radicals such as the Garielle family in New Orleans, Sokol provides us with a history of the Civil Rights Era that is necessary and long overdue.
There should be many studies devoted to the topics that Sokol has introduced in this work, and it should foster the flourishment of the historiography of the Civil Rights Era for years to come.
A great read, but not entirely honest.......2007-02-05
As a Southerner who started first grade in a segregated classroom in 1966, attended a "token" integrated classroom in 1967, and attended an all-white private school thereafter, I found this book interesting and hard to put down. I agree with the praise given by other posters, although I do have some criticisms.
The author relies on research and publications of the past, which is understandable. There is no other way the book could be written today. The book deals mostly with the period 1955 to 1975, but the failure to update a few facts could almost be taken as an intentional effort to mislead the reader.
For example, we are told that the business leadership of Yazoo City, Miss., strongly supported the public schools, and as a result after integration the schools remained 40 percent white. This is true, but today, the Yazoo City school system is 97 percent black. I discovered this fact after 30 seconds on the Internet, so why couldn't the author provide this information.
Likewise, the author suggests that white life goes on as always in places like Eutaw, Ala., where everyone happily attends the "safety-valve" Warrior Academy. Again, a web search quickly reveals that Warrior Academy has only 118 students, K-12. An October 22, 2002 story in the Birmingham News, "Private white academies struggle in changing world," describes how most Alabama Black Belt academies are providing a sub-standard education and barely keeping their doors open. These facts contradict the author's conclusions, so he just leaves them out.
The author correctly notes that the poor whites shouldered the burden of integration, although I do wonder how the author could suggest it was a burden, since he also suggests it provided them with their "freedom." Most poor and working class whites exercised their new freedom by moving. The result is that is many Southern communities there literally are no or few working class or poor white people left.
I would suggest to any scholar wishing to study integration in the South that he start by finding the full-page newspaper advertisements by prominent white parents declaring their support of public schools (i.e. Yazoo City, Rolling Fork, among others), and then follow up where their children actually graduated high school. In short, find out why those who wanted to support public education and integration left the public schools, despite their public proclamations of support. Doing so might provide the best guide for the education of Southern children.
Book Description
Grossman's rich, detailed analysis of black migration to Chicago during World War I and its aftermath brilliantly captures the cultural meaning of the movement.
"A vivid portrayal of an archetypical modernizing experience—peasants pulling up roots, moving to distant cities, and seeking to adapt to the strange new world of industrial capitalism."—George M. Fredrickson, Times Literary Supplement
Customer Reviews:
This is the best on the subject.......2005-03-23
As a fellow researcher in the area of Southern to Northern migration, Grossman's book has been invaluable to me. It is well written, well researched, and immensely interesting. It is the best book on the first great black Southern migration to Chicago, "The Land of Hope."
Book Description
Containing more than 500 recipes in every imaginable category, The Blue Willow Inn Bible of Southern Cooking is a staple in kitchens of everyone who appreciates classic Southern cooking. It is a book that contains not only classic recipes that have been handed down for generations, but also new Southern favorites. Destined to become a classic along the lines of Betty Crocker, Fannie Farmer, and The Joy of Cooking, The Blue Willow Inn Bible of Southern Cooking will sell for years to come.
Recipes include:
Fried Sweet Potatoes
Corn Pudding
Squash Dressing
Fried Green Tomatoes
Apple Stack Cake
Sawmill Gravy
Cathead Biscuits.
Customer Reviews:
Blue Willow Inn Bible of Southern Cooking Review.......2007-07-21
This cookbook is a wonderful example of what southern cooking is all about. It has basic recipes which are simple, traditional and flavorful. I have searched for some of these recipes for years and finally found them in this wonderful cookbook. Best cookbook I own!
"The Blue Willow Inn Bible of Southern Cooking...".......2007-01-10
This cook book was an excellent choice! It is very informative, plus offers GREAT recipes.
Not for me.......2007-01-09
I should have listened to L. Ross' Review. The subtitle should have been Bible of 1950's Southern Cooking. Recipies heavy on the use of prepared foods and packet seasonings.
The book claims to contain over 600 Essential Recipies Southerners have enjoyed for Generations. Only a few are the traditional ones my Grandmother cooked at the turn of the last century (1900). This is a book I will pass on rather than keep.
Not so traditional southern cooking.......2006-11-15
When I think of southern cooking, I think of my grandmother and our family gatherings. She would go all out. Fried eggs, grits and buscuits for breakfast. Fried chicken, rolls, beans, greens and potatoes for dinner. I loved her cooking and her she has always been the baseline I use for good southern cooking.
After reading through a few of the reviews for the Blue Willow Inn Bible of Southern Cooking, I felt comfortable with my purchase. However, the moment I cracked open the book, I felt let down. Most of the dishes include canned vegitables over fresh. Processed foods over basics. Not the way I remembered things and certainly not the way I prefer to cook today.
However, it was the biscuit recipe that drove me to return the book. The recipe uses self-rising flour over baking powder or cream of tartar. I don't know of a single southern grandmother that didn't use baking powder when I was growing up.
I realized that the book is the actual recipes for the Blue Willow Inn and that when cooking in mass quantities, they appear to take shortcuts to save time and energy. Understandable if you are cooking for dozens of families a day perhaps. But again, not the way I cook.
If you are looking for quick and easy recipes, this book is for you. But I don't think that this could be considered true southern cooking from the past.
Blue Willow Inn Bible of Southern Cooking.......2006-11-04
A great American cookbook with lots of truly southern recipes that will appeal to all Americans. I found several recipes that I had been looking for for many years and many delicious new ones. A wonderful addition to my recipe collection.
Customer Reviews:
Falling Just Short Isn't Good Enough.......2004-12-28
One must keep in mind the time period of the book, which was the Great Depression. One must also remember that any kind of pervasive, endemic change on the scale of industrialism is bound to provoke a reaction. The stellar aspect of this book is the exhibition of a high order, intellectual critique of Modernism of a kind not usually originating from the South. Another stellar aspect of this book is the multitude of angles the attack is delivered from (historical, philosophical, religious, artistic). The one thing they all have in common is an astounding degree of rhetorical sophistication - these agrarians knew their adversary and were relentless in scourging it. For this, we owe them great thanks. That having been said, I doubt the Southern Agrarians could have ever conceived of man terraforming Mars, mining one of Jupiter's moons, or any of the things that we take for granted as inevitability. I never wish to be thought a better conservative than Edmund Burke, and he once remarked that when history has spoken, an opposing virtue may become not only immoral but perverse. It would seem that the record of history is against the agrarians. If man is to have the room and the land and the freedom they sought, it will have to be on the other side of the industrial Modernism they so hated and feared. Perhaps upon a green Mars, newly primed and ready for settlement?....
Interesting Reading.......2004-07-23
I would not go so far as to say any of these gentlemen is absolutely correct in their work, but this collection is extremely important if you want some understanding of the southern mind at the begining of the Great Depression. This is very much a regional book and will have little interest to anyone who isn't searching for some meaning from the South. It is great reading however. Although the essays in the book are not connected, the general theme is one of a general distrust of the modern industrial world where people have no connection to place and stable values and ideals. There is a definate feeling of longing for the agrarian South of old that was slowly slipping away at the time. Very interesting.
The Agrarian South Vs. The Industrial North.......2004-02-23
These southern writers of I'll Take My Stand, sounded like farmers, but were mostly professors who originated from the south. Many of them lived and taught outside the south, but still had Dixie on their minds. All of them were connected in some way with Vanderbilt University. These are southern gentleman writers with flowing prose and show that the south is not completely anti-intellectual, though one writer says that southerners were not into learning just for learnings's sake, like in the north. I will say anti-intellectualism does shield people from bad ideas and keeps them to the tried and true old ways.
In general, the argument is that the agrarian culture of the south was superior to the industrial culture of the north. Farmers were self-sufficient and were able to remain independent from the government and the money economy by growing their own food, making their own clothes, and building their own shelters. The ideal farming which preserves the southern culture is pre-dominately subsistence farming and does not depend on money crops and the boom and bust economy. The King Cotton cash crop was criticized because once it was over-produced and prices for it fell, farmers fell into never ending debt. One writer mentions that farmers should not be into farming to get rich, but to preserve an agrarian lifestyle.
It is also mentioned that farm work was not as mechanical as the factory work of the North. It was claimed that the South had more time for leisure to support a richer cultural life than the North. The North is accused of money-grubbing, emphasizing economic concerns over quality of life concerns. One writer regrets that the South did not become a hot spot for higher learning, like the North East had become. If only the South hadn't been invaded by Yankees, their culture would have developed more and became permanent!
There are some complaints about cars and how the roads are detrimental to farming life and the agrarian culture of the South. In general, the authors were concerned with preserving this culture and were worried that since they lost the Civil War, they would eventually lose their culture to the industrial culture of the north. It is a good book to find out about what life was like for southerners after the war--what pressures and problems of survival they had and the poverty they faced.
There is some discussion of the civil war. One author saw the war as war between two cultures that were diametrically opposed to one another. The north needed the south to live off of and so it could not let her go. It is also interesting to note that the south did not like tariffs because they were detrimental to farmers, but the north did.
The problem of slavery is presented as something that was forced on America by England, since England was making a fortune off the slave trade. The south was not blamed for having the pre-dominate share of slaves until about 1830 when a fanatical abolitionist by the name of William Lloyd Garrison started circulating "stories" about "evil" slave owners who mistreated their slaves terribly.
The agrarian south and its culture is a ghost of its former self, but some of these issues live own with writers like Wendell Berry who advocate going back to the farm and becoming more self-sufficient, while being less southern and more racially egalitarian. Luddites will like this book. The book shows convincely that if technology changes, it changes the culture and many people won't like those changes. The writers often seem justifiably bitter about the way things turned out for the south, with their nation and culture being conquered and all. And what can I say? The book is bedrock conservative, sometimes stultifyingly so, you'll have blow the dust off this one!
Southern Schizophrenia.......2003-01-06
As an expatriate Southerner, I admit that much of this work makes me a bit dewey-eyed, especially "Cousin Lucius." That said, the whole idea of the book is a foolishly romantic view of a mythical Southern Past. Every reasonably literate Southerner is familiar with Faulkner's line that "the past isn't dead, it isn't even past." I reject that. Southerners do not live with their past, they live with, one might say in, a mythically remembered past. The antebellum South was much more like Olmstead's critical descriptions than the happy place described by the slave-holding oligarchs. 300,000 mostly poor men died in the rich men's attempt to preserve their pretenses. In the aftermath, both the white and black poor of the South were sentenced to peonage for a century while the scions of the pre-war big men feasted on Yankee table scraps. That is the truth. The Agrarians describe a society they wanted to see because Southerners just couldn't bring themselves to see the ruin of poverty, ignorance, and xenophobia that surrounded them. Atlanta may indeed represent what a quarter million Confederate soldiers died to prevent. But there really wasn't an Atlanta as romantic Southerners want to remember it.
An extraordinary collection of essays........2002-06-28
In spite of the title (it comes from the chorus of "Dixie"), this book is not about the War, or a celebration of the Old South. It is rather a collection of essays in support of the Southern Agrarian movement centered at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s and 30s. The unique thing about this book is the uniformly high literary quality of the essays. Take a look at the table of contents. One would be hard-pressed to find another collection of essays by such an ensemble of writers, poets, and historians. Anyone interested in who we are and how we got here as Americans should read this book.
The views expressed in this book may not ultimately make sense when considered from the point of view of an economist. Nonetheless, after reading it, you'll wonder whether there might not have been an alternative to either the brutal, dehumanizing calculations of the socialists in their various guises, or the materialistic worship of progress and the almighty dollar that capitalism brings us. It is a book with an old-fashioned humanism and dignity that is seldom encountered anymore. The modern reader may be startled, for example, to be presented with the idea that education is something more than the vocational training it is today, but rather a course of personal development in which the pupil comes to understand his place and role in society, in which the pupil becomes cultured, if you will. Nowadays, "culture" means that we play Mozart to our children in utero, so that when ill-mannered little Brandon grows up, he'll be one leg up on the competition for that lucrative securities analyst job on Wall Street.
I can well remember reading "The Life and Death of Cousin Lucius", from this book, in school growing up. Many of the essays stick with you, and stand up to multiple re-readings.
Even if you don't agree with a call for a return to a rural, agrarian society (and I don't, but even that fact makes me sad after I read this book), it's well worth reading.
Book Description
Between 1900 and the 1970s, twenty million southerners migrated north and west. Weaving together for the first time the histories of these black and white migrants, James Gregory traces their paths and experiences in a comprehensive new study that demonstrates how this regional diaspora reshaped America by "southernizing" communities and transforming important cultural and political institutions.
Challenging the image of the migrants as helpless and poor, Gregory shows how both black and white southerners used their new surroundings to become agents of change. Combining personal stories with cultural, political, and demographic analysis, he argues that the migrants helped create both the modern civil rights movement and modern conservatism. They spurred changes in American religion, notably modern evangelical Protestantism, and in popular culture, including the development of blues, jazz, and country music.
In a sweeping account that pioneers new understandings of the impact of mass migrations, Gregory recasts the history of twentieth-century America. He demonstrates that the southern diaspora was crucial to transformations in the relationship between American regions, in the politics of race and class, and in the roles of religion, the media, and culture.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent look in population shift.......2007-07-27
This was required reading for a graduate course in American history.
In his book The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America, author James N. Gregory proceeds thematically, rather than chronologically. His intent is to use a stereoscopic method (stereoscopes set two similar but different images next to each other, thus tricking the eyes and the brain into fusing the images in a way that makes them three dimensional) in order to achieve a third dimension (page 8): not only to examine the great internal movements of black and white peoples from the American South to the American North and West, but also to examine the social, cultural, economic, and political impact that this massive internal movement of peoples had on the history of America during the twentieth century.
Gregory's The Southern Diaspora is divided into nine chapters: Chapter 1, "A Century of Migration," is an overview of the of the migration cycles and the changing economics and demography of these migrations over the course of the twentieth century, concluding that the Southern Diaspora was numerically larger than previous scholars have understood; Chapter 2, "Migration Stories," surveys the public meanings of the two sets of exoduses and highlights the unique role that media institutions and social scientists played in shaping the expectations and interactions of southerners on the move; Chapter 3, "Success and Failure," answers questions about the economic experience of black and white southerners, dismantling the maladjustment paradigm that had been so prominent in previous scholarship while also showing the critical differences in the opportunity structure facing black and white southern migrants; Chapter 4,
"The Black Metropolis," examines the communities that African Americans built in the major cities, resurrecting the label "Black Metropolis" and mapping the new and powerful cultural apparatus of those communities; Chapter 5, "Uptown and Beyond," examines the very different community formations of white southerners who spread out through suburbs and rural areas as well as big cities, struggled with confusing issues of social identity, and developed cultural institutions of historical import (e.g., diaspora country music and the white diaspora literary community would help to reshape understandings of both region and race); Chapter 6. "Gospel Highways," explores the diaspora's impact on American religion as both racial groups built Baptist and Pentecostal churches and helped to revitalize and spread evangelical Protestantism, with important political as well as religious implications for America; Chapter 7, "Leveraging Civil Rights," develops the issue of black political influence, demonstrating how important geography was to the initial phases of what ultimately became the civil rights movement;
Chapter 8, "Re-figuring Conservatism," brings the white migrants into the story of race, class, and regional transformations, exploring contributions to white working class conservatism on the one hand, and to new formulations of white liberalism on the other. Chapter 9, "Great
Migrations," brings te diaspora to a close in the 1970s and 1980s, and summarized some of Gregory's major findings (pages 8 and 9).
One important point made by Gregory is that for as long as there was something called the American South, southerners in significant numbers had been leaving; the South itself expanded through migration as white southerners in the early 1800s carved out new states for cotton and
slavery, while others moved to places north and west that today are understood to be regionally separate from the South. White out-migration was especially heavy in the two decades after the Civil War, with many leaving for farming opportunities and others settling in the North's big
cities-New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago-where the nation's commerce was concentrated. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were more than 1 million southern-born whites living outside their birth region. Census takers also counted more than 335,000 southern born African Americans living in the North and West in 1900 (page 12).
African Americans had left the South in the nineteenth century for different reasons and in different directions. Before the Civil War, some had been taken west by slaveholders who dared to move their human property into places like California and Kansas; others had escaped
northward, typically to Ohio, upstate New York, Massachusetts, and Canada. There was also something of an exodus of free black people from the South after 1830, with many of them settling in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. Emancipation increased out-migration among black southerners, much of it directed toward northern cities (New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago were key destinations for freed people from Virginia and Maryland after the Civil War), but rural destinations were also and equally important: black southern migration, frequently organized by "colonization" or "emigration" societies, moved north into Indiana and west into Kansas from Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee in the 1870s and 1880s (pages 12 and 13).
The central thesis of Gregory's Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America, is threefold. First, the size of the black and white southern diaspora was much more substantial than previously reported: over the course of the
twentieth century, close to 8 million black southerners, nearly 20 million white southerners, and more than 1 million southern-born Latinos participated in the diaspora (page 14). Second, the twentieth century southern diaspora can be divided into two periods: the first phase of migration . starts during the initial decade of the century, grows in the second decade when at least 1.3 million southerners leave home, reaches a peak in the 1920s with 2 million new black and white southern migrants, then tapers off in the 1930s; a much bigger second wave begins with World
War II when more than 4 million southerners move north or west, grows even larger in the 1950s when at least 4.3 million leave the South, remains near that level through the 1960s and 1970s, and then declines in the 1980s and 1990s (pages 14 and 15). Third, white southern out-migrants
outnumbered black southern out-migrants during every decade of the twentieth century, and usually by a large margin. But the southern black exodus had the more important impact: blacks were leaving the South at much higher rates than whites, and many were going to geographic
regions that had known little racial diversity (pages 15 and 17). The largest number of black migrants lived in the Great Lakes states (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin); they were also the key destination for white southerners. The Middle Atlantic states (New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey) were second as a destination for African Americans, but-with the exception of New York City-much less popular with whites. The Pacific states was the third important area of settlement for both groups, especially California: by 1970, more than 1.6
million white and 571,000 black southerners lived in that state. California was also the chief destination for Tejanos and other southern-born Latinos, 213,000 of whom had settled there by 1970; Hispanic southerners had also migrated to Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana (pages 18 and 19).
Gregory challenges the image that southern migrants in the north and west were merely helpless and poor. While they faced many cultural, social, and economic challenges from within and without their culture, these migrants also had a substantial support system of family relations, organizations, and institutions that enabled them not just to survive, but even to thrive and succeed in differing environments despite tremendous odds. Financially, the majority of southern migrants did much better than their contemporaries who chose to remain in the South.
Whites and blacks left the South for related but somewhat different reasons, and found very different opportunities in the North and West. Those differences turned on the central issue of race, and from that flowed other significant differences derived from geography, class dynamics, and community formation patterns. Racial privilege granted southern white migrants significant economic and spatial advantages (i.e., the choice of where, how, and with whom they settled) over their black counterparts; that advantage was used to choose the best housing they could afford in the least dense neighborhoods, often in outlying, rather than central, urban areas. The fact that black and white southerners settled in different sorts of places, in different
concentrations would have implications not just on southern individual and group experiences, but on the North, the West, and the nation as a whole. Despite the fact that white migrants had greater numbers, black migrants gained capacities to influence cultural and political institutions that would ultimately dictate profound historical changes; The fact that whites chose dispersion over concentration, and opted for places that initially would not be centers of political and cultural power, worked against the construction of physically defined southern white communities. The loyalties and activities of elites and middle-class migrants became a key resource for African American communities, while white, middle class expatriates kept their distance from working class migrants, limiting the possibilities for group institution building and political influence. White southern migrants were influential in the promotion of evangelical churches, the development and spread of country music, and in the particular brand of racial conservatism and white working class politics that benefited from southern white symbolism.
African American influence was more comprehensive and consequential: the building of communities in the major cities in America during a period when those cities monopolized important forms of power, especially in media (publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, record companies, theatre, and film), inspired African American literature and artistic endeavors in a myriad of forms and in a slow, but steady and meaningful acknowledgement of its worth. Politically, the particular arrangement of parties, unions, and municipal and federal governments in northern metropolises, especially during the "long New Deal," gave black voters and activists opportunities to leverage governmental power. By working with allies that were available only in those places, by finding balance-of-power openings that appeared as urban regimes reorganized (and as the northern democratic Party tried to consolidate its hold on federal power)-while using tactics that were safe and effective only in those settings-the seams of power were loosened in a governmental system that previously had rarely responded to the demands of socially despised minorities (pages 325-327). Finally, regional reconstruction was the other
important legacy of the Southern Diaspora. Over time, black and white migrants southernized aspects of the regions they settled by introducing tastes, practices, and institutions-including food, music, religion, accents, and political styles-that moderated the differences between the
South and the rest of the United States (page 327).
In my opinion, Gregory has successfully presented a thematic history of the black and white disapora from the American South to points North and West. The only weakness, as I see it, is that this examination could not have been made in a more chronological, and less thematic fashion. Or given the daunting nature of his effort, if the had been more satisfied to provide a more intensive examination of only one or only several of his intended themes, the work would not give this reader a sense of being "all over the place." Nevertheless, Gregory has contributed a
necessary work of revisionist history of scholastic depth and eminent readability.
Recommended reading for anyone interested in American history.
harder experiences for blacks than for whites.......2007-06-24
By now, several historians have looked at the experiences in the massive migrations of Negroes from the American South to its northern cities from 1900 to the post World War 2 era. But of course, many poor southern whites also voted with their feet and moved north. The unifying theme Gregory has chosen is to look at both migrations. And to compare and contrast the experiences of both groups.
For studying whites, he goes beyond looking at the so-called hillbilly ghettos that sprang up in various northern cities. In the popular (white northern) imagination of the times, these were considered well nigh akin to the often neighbouring black ghettos. Gregory points out that most southern whites had quite different experiences, though they were still invariably stereotyped by white northerners.
We see examples of blacks and whites struggling to improve themselves. Often politically. While there were indeed many common facets, what persistently emerges is that blacks had to work harder to overcome obstacles.
Required for class.......2007-02-10
This book was required reading by a professor. His superior intellect decided this was a good book so I am compelled to agree... even if I didn't read it.
Amazon.com's Best of 2001
When Katherine Clark began interviewing Eugene Walter (1921-98) in 1991 for an oral biography of this Mobile, Alabama, legend's picaresque life, friends asked her, "Do you think he will tell you the truth?" "I certainly hope not!" she replied. Clark, herself a Southerner, understood that the charm of Walter's conversation came from his brilliantly polished stories, in which "at a certain point the actual gives way to the apocryphal." So readers shouldn't ask if Tallulah Bankhead really gave Walter three pubic hairs or if Anna Magnani actually asked the mayor of Rome to help find Walter's lost cat: that's not the point. These anecdotes express Walter's appreciation of people he likes, and although the narrative is stuffed with famous names from Truman Capote to Leontyne Price, the exuberant protagonist finds less celebrated folks just as fascinating. His loving evocation of Mobile in the 1920s, when the front porch was the center of all social life, is just as detailed as his portraits of sojourns in more glamorous enclaves: Greenwich Village after World War II ("where I could sit in the evenings and hear Jane and Paul Bowles quarreling in their nearby apartment"); Paris in the early 1950s (his short story "Troubador" appeared in the first issue of Paris Review); and Rome during its La Dolce Vita years. Walter refused Fellini's plea that he perform with his marionettes in that particular movie, but he played an American journalist in 8 1/2 and "must have been in over a hundred of those crazy Italian films" before returning to Mobile in 1979. ("Sooner or later all Southerners come home, not to die, but to eat gumbo.") Clark, who captured an Alabama midwife's wisdom in Motherwit, gets out of her subject's way and lets his words create an enchanting world in this marvelously entertaining reminiscence. --Wendy Smith
Book Description
This sumptuous oral biography of Eugene Walter, the best-known man you’ve never heard of, is an eyewitness history of the heart of the last century—enlivened with personal glimpses of luminaries from William Faulkner and Martha Graham to Judy Garland and Leontyne Price—and a pitch-perfect addition to the Southern literary tradition that has critics cheering. In his 76 years, Eugene Walter ate of “the ripened heart of life,” to quote a letter from Isak Dinesen, one of his many illustrious friends. Walter savored the porch life of his native Mobile, Alabama, in the 1920s and ’30s; stumbled into the Greenwich Village art scene in late-1940s New York; was a ubiquitous presence in Paris’s expatriate café society in the 1950s (where he was part of the Paris Review at its inception); and later, in 1960s Rome, participated in the golden age of Italian cinema. He was somehow everywhere, bringing with him a unique and contagious spirit, putting his inimitable stamp on the cultural life of the twentieth century.
Customer Reviews:
Gore Vidal calls Eugene Walter the "nice" Truman Capote.......2003-05-29
I completely fell under the spell of Eugene Walter but must pay homage to author Katherine Clark for seamlessly allowing us to believe we are spending hour after hour with Eugene as he spins fascinating story after fascinating story about his southern childhood, his friends, both famous and obscure, and what it was like to work in every capacity on Fellini movies. Recently I saw a friend from Mobile and said, "I'm just going to say two words to you. EUGENE WALTER. It was so satisfying to see her face light up and hear her squeal, "I LOVE EUGENE WALTER!!!!"
Just like talking to Eugene........2002-03-19
I suppose I was one of the fortunate few who had a chance to meet Eugene before he died. The people I was working for back in the mid-nineties were friends of his and, therefore, I had the chance to be around him.
Eugene was the consummate storyteller. One of those who never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn. His idea was to make you enjoy where you were and who you were. To inject a little wonderousness into the world. Although based in truth, nothing he told was strictly true.
This book captures him almost perfectly. Although it cannot convey his gestures and antics and voice, it does convey his mind and gift for gab. Pour yourself a glass of port and read with the voice of an eccentric Southern uncle in your head and Eugene starts to come out. It's not quite the same as being there, but this book is as close as any of us will ever be again.
Being there.......2002-03-06
"As-told-to" scribe Katherine Clark preserves Eugene Walter's voice in the memoir of this "character," as we call folks like him down South. Imagine Truman Capote without the best-selling books and TV fame. This is how Walter comes across in this memoir-autobiography-oral history transcript. He is a Southern Zelig, always showing up in pivotal moments in the development of literature and arts during the mid-20th century. Recalling his days in late 1940s New York, 1950s Paris and 1950s-60s Rome, he drops more names than the New York City phone book. From Greta Garbo to Judy Garland to Frederico Fellini, he hangs out with them all. The best-written portions of the book deal with his native Mobile, however. But who is he? He's the ultimate fly-on-the-wall. He writes some, acts some, translates movie scripts, throws cheap yet creative parties and plays the part of Southern eccentric in Europe. Who is he? He seems like an early 1970s Dick Cavett Show guest: an obscure bon vivant who shows up with George Plimpton to discuss a new Martha Graham dance or to cook a Southern meal. I ran across a mention of the book in an Oxford American magazine article and got a copy after reading a couple of very positive reviews by critics like Jonathan Yardly of the Washington Post. The book also received a 2001 National Book Critics Circle award nomination for biography. It's not for everyone. And I'm probably in that group. But it is intriguing and engaging and, at time, humorous. And at all times, like its subject, unique.
Milking the Memories.......2002-02-28
Walker is a Southern storyteller. He more than fits his own definition of one who speaks with dozens of side tales (parentheses). Webster calls these parenthetical expressions "a remark or passage that departs from the theme of a discourse." Walker may depart from the theme, but he always returns, and it always fits. He says: "The mark of a good storyteller is: Have a whole shelf full of shoeboxes of details.... It's like those ballad singers at the Scottish lords who improvised new verses for those ballads every night...." What music this Southern balladeer makes especially as he explains the use of the Southern front porch for storytelling, visiting, shelling peas, and an explanation of the etiquette of porch visiting. He even makes a detour (parentheses) to explain how front and back porches differ (shell peas on the front porch, shrimp on the back). One comes away understanding why Walker fit in so perfectly with the side walk café salons of Paris and Rome. The Southern porches were his training ground. Those were the original talking salons. One almost hears the music of porch furniture: "...a whole world of wicker or rattan chairs and divans and tables and plant stands and swings big enough for three people. How I wish some composer had heard, as I, the different sounds of porch swings. Everything from rattle-squeak to crunch-budge-tink. With a bass accompaniment of shuffling feet, often bare." Ah, these were the real salons, set to music, before people had to go to Paris to talk and before Americans discovered those faux porches that serve as little more than standing room on the front of today's dull houses. Walker explains the South as he remembers it, the South he carried with him around the world, and it makes any Southerner long for the South of his/her youth, or it beckons any curious Yankee to come and savor a romantic time and place that they've never experienced....
incredible.......2002-01-02
I'm usually about as materialistic as Eugene Walter-- which is to say not very-- but I'm being very cautious about loaning my copy of the this book, scared to death I'll lose it. This is one of the best books I have ever read (other favorites in this genre are How I Became Hettie Jones and Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters). I know that most of that is the fabulous Walter himself, but a lot of it has to be to Clark's skill as an editor. Letting a subject speak in his or her own voice is very difficult, and Clark does it wonderfully. It reminds me of Walter's anecdote about how he translated scripts-- he threw the original script away and let the essence shine through. Clark lets Walter shine through.
Book Description
Why did the Confederacy lose the Civil War? Most historians point to the larger number of Union troops, or to the North's greater industrial might. Now, in The South Vs. the South, a leading authority on the Civil War era offers a critical supplementary viewpoint. William Freehling argues that 450,000 Union troops from the South--especially border state whites and southern blacks--helped cost the Confederacy the war. In addition, when the southern border states rejected the Confederacy, half the South's industrial capacity swelled the North's advantage. Whether revising our conception of Union military strategy or of slavery, or changing our perceptions of blacks' role in producing Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, or finding new meanings in what is arguably America's greatest piece of sculpture, Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Shaw Memorial, or establishing the antecedents to Martin Luther King, Jr., Freehling's piercing insight and rhetorical verve yield a major new Civil War narrative.
Customer Reviews:
Important like the rest of his work.......2007-09-25
This like the rest of Freehling's work is important. In recent years a trend has developed to submerge the central issue of the civil war--slavery--in a myriad of other issues leading to the war and thus diminishing the importance of the war for the US and the World. Part of this slide from confronting the central issue is a tendency to be cosier to attitudes justifying or defending the slaveholders Confederacy in the war.
This book is very clear that within the South, the majority of the population did not support the Confederacy and probably a plurality of the South at first and then a majority actively worked to destroy the Confederacy. The Confederacy was not a Southern republic, it was a slaveholders republic.
Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Missouri were slave states, but they went with the union. Considerable portions of Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina supported the Confederacy throughout the war, and large groups of white people throughout the South opposed the Confederacy. This book explains that without this opposition, the Union would have never been able to enter the South and attack the Confederacy's military and political centers so easily and would have had to mobilize many more troops were there more Confederate support in the areas the Union liberated.
For the most part, the Union liberated rather than occupied the South because as the author explained, African Americans overwhelming supported the union and selflessly through themselves into the war, working first to build defenses, transport materials, tend to the sick, guide the troops, and forage for food and supplies. Later, hundreds of thousands of African Americans volunteered to serve in the Union Army, providing a ready made force available right in the South to support the Union lines against slaveholder terrorism.
What I found unique here was his analysis of the 1864 election and his view that had Mclellan, the Democrat who ran against Lincoln won, the South would have still been defeated, although he leaves open whether slavery would have been obliterated the way it was under the Republicans.
This is a good read, and not as ponderous as his other work, although his new work is decisive to understanding American history as a whole.
A West Virginian Begs to Differ.......2007-06-28
My review of this book only concerns the narrow issue of West Virginia, so it may not be useful to most readers, but I think it pertinent. Mr. Freehling shows little understanding of the situation in western Virginia and misinterprets what he does know. At one point he says West Virginians favored the Union 3 to 1, later he says 2 to 1. Richard Curry's research into West Virginia's vote shows approximately 34,667 against and 19,121 votes in favor of secession ("A House Divided"). The mistake most historians make is presuming that vote to be solidly pro-Union, while in actuality much of it was a vote for the status-quo. Only in the far north-west counties could it be considered pro-Union. Twenty-four counties, approximately two-thirds of the territory of the state, voted for secession. The WV Division of Culture and History has admitted that the number of Confederate volunteers in West Virginia was about equal to that of Union volunteers, which would make West Virginia the most Confederate of the border states. Gen. Jacob Cox (U.S.) noted in his memoirs that while stationed in Charleston he knew that sentiment was against secession, yet a number of those who voted against secession had joined the Confederate army as loyal Virginians. Berkeley county rejected secession almost 3 to 1, yet gave twice the number of men to the Confederate army as to the Union. In the anti-Secession counties of Cabell and Wayne the populace was very hostile to Wheeling and gave sizeable numbers of volunteers to the Confederacy. Charles Ambler even lists Cabell county among the secessionist counties as having nothing whatever to do with the new state. The true watermark of Unionism in West Virginia is in the voter turnout for Wheeling's initiatives, which were pitifully low. Wheeling even allowed out-of-state Union soldiers to vote in order to boost the numbers, as they themselves testify in their own Constitutional Convention records. From those same Convention records, Mr. Sinsel on Jan 13, 1862 said: "Who denies that McDowell, Wyoming, Raleigh, Calhoun, Gilmer, Braxton, Clay, Tucker, Randolph, Webster, Nicholas, Boone, Logan, Pocahontas, Roane, Wirt, Monroe, and Greenbrier-add to that Barbour and many others-are all dominated by the spirit of rebellion?". Arthur Boreman wrote to Francis Pierpoint in 1862 that everything south of Parkersburg (most of the state) was practically the Confederacy. This book merely reiterates the work of Virgil Lewis and Charles Ambler in putting more lipstick on the pig of West Virginia Unionism.
Much Needed Book.......2007-05-19
This book is typical of William Freehling's writings: smooth style, intriguing research, and interesting, prpvpcative conclusions. It is a great read and well worth close study.
Very Interesting Thoughts, But Writing Hard To Follow.......2007-03-07
The main thesis of this book is that the most important determinant concerning the outcome of the American Civil War was the hundreds of thousands of "Southerners" who fought for the Union instead of the Confederacy. Here, some definitions might be helpful for understanding Freehling's claim. Freehling includes all those from the Upper South (or the Boarder States, as most people know them by; Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia) in his group, "Southerners". Insofar as these states were slave states before the war, and shared a lot in common with the South, his labeling of the people as "Southerners" requires not too large a stretch of the imagination. Freehling also includes black anti-Confederates (i.e., fugitive slaves) as "Southerners", which of course he should.
When one includes escaped slaves and whites from the Upper South, then indeed roughly 300,000 "Southerners" fought for the Union in the American Civil War. Freehling's thesis is that these Unionist Southerners are the most important factor in the outcome of the war. I think he is correct, and he defends his thesis in a number of different ways, from simple numerical comparisons to examinations of some key or illuminating battles.
One thing I really enjoyed about this book is that Freehling makes some claims that I either initially found hard to accept or simply had never though about. For example, Freehling deals with the Union presidential election of 1864, claiming that even if McClellan had won the North probably would have completed the war, rejecting disunion. This has been a very debatable topic among historians, and Freehling here provides some new insight that I found convincing.
However, Freehling's writing is fairly poor for an academic of his stature. At times it was very difficult to follow what he was saying, and yet at other times he would go on and on with simple comparisons with no end in sight. I would say that three-fourths of the book is accessible enough, but the remaining one-fourth is a big headache to read.
Aside form poor writing, I have to dock another star in my review for Freehling's poor citation. I noticed that many times he didn't provide proper citation when making a big claim, and in one case he mad a huge claim (that fire-eating radicals in South Carolina were able to sweep their state out of the Union even though too small a percentage of the population actually supported secession) and then cited a book that he was in the process of writing but hadn't been published! Surely Freehling can do better than this...
Pick this book up if you're specifically looking for a work that makes a synthetic argument concerning the importance of Unionist Southerners. If you're looking for just any Civil War book for pleasure reading, you can probably get away with skipping this one.
Useful; well written.......2006-08-25
From the day after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, most historians, Civil War buffs, history teachers, and everyone else always said and wrote that the South lost the Civil War due, mainly, to a shortage of manpower and the fact that the North had more industry. Recently, though, several historians have started to say while those reasons are true, there are other factors to look at. Freehling, along with David J. Eicher, is one of the leading proponents of the thought that the anti-Confederate Southerners, as well as politics, played a large role in the South's losing the war. Freehling focuses on the idea of a non-unified South to explain the Confederate loss. While Freehling does point out some eye-opening statistics, most of what he writes will be old news to most well-read Civil War followers. The book is useful for the theory Freehling espouses as well as the chapters on the role of African Americans both North and South. Freehling also does an excellent job of agreeing with some of Gary Gallagher's points (who, he asserts in the prologue, gave him in the inspiration to write the book after Gallagher published a book about how the South lost due to inferior manpower, etc.) despite the fact he does not agree with Gallagher's overall hypothesis. This is good because it shows that Freehling is open to ideas besides his own and isn't doggedly pursuing his goal without doing any real research. The negative, though, is that Freehling's book could have been half the size as he seemed to restate many of his facts. Whether you agree with Freehling's idea or not, the book is still a useful, and well written, work.
Book Description
The relationship between welfare and racial inequality has long been understood as a fight between liberal and conservative forces. In The Segregated Origins of Social Security, Mary Poole challenges that basic assumption. Meticulously reconstructing the behind-the-scenes politicking that gave birth to the 1935 Social Security Act, Poole demonstrates that segregation was built into the very foundation of the welfare state because white policy makers--both liberal and conservative--shared an interest in preserving white race privilege.
Although northern white liberals were theoretically sympathetic to the plight of African Americans, Poole says, their primary aim was to save the American economy by salvaging the pride of America's "essential" white male industrial workers. The liberal framers of the Social Security Act elevated the status of Unemployment Insurance and Social Security--and the white workers they were designed to serve--by differentiating them from welfare programs, which served black workers.
Revising the standard story of the racialized politics of Roosevelt's New Deal, Poole's arguments also reshape our understanding of the role of public policy in race relations in the twentieth century, laying bare the assumptions that must be challenged if we hope to put an end to racial inequality in the twenty-first.
Book Description
Focusing on the cultural conflicts between social reformers and southern communities, William Link presents an important reinterpretation of the origins and impact of progressivism in the South. He shows that a fundamental clash of values divided reformers and rural southerners, ultimately blocking the reforms. His book, based on extensive archival research, adds a new dimension to the study of American reform movements.
The new group of social reformers that emerged near the end of the nineteenth century believed that the South, an underdeveloped and politically fragile region, was in the midst of a social crisis. They recognized the environmental causes of social problems and pushed for interventionist solutions. As a consensus grew about southern social problems in the early 1900s, reformers adopted new methods to win the support of reluctant or indifferent southerners. By the beginning of World War I, their public crusades on prohibition, health, schools, woman suffrage, and child labor had led to some new social policies and the beginnings of a bureaucratic structure. By the late 1920s, however, social reform and southern progressivism remained largely frustrated.
Link's analysis of the response of rural southern communities to reform efforts establishes a new social context for southern progressivism. He argues that the movement failed because a cultural chasm divided the reformers and the communities they sought to transform. Reformers were paternalistic. They believed that the new policies should properly be administered from above, and they were not hesitant to impose their own solutions. They also viewed different cultures and races as inferior.
Rural southerners saw their communities and customs quite differently. For most, local control and personal liberty were watchwords. They had long deflected attempts of southern outsiders to control their affairs, and they opposed the paternalistic reforms of the Progressive Era with equal determination. Throughout the 1920s they made effective implementation of policy changes difficult if not impossible. In a small-scale war, rural folk forced the reformers to confront the integrity of the communities they sought to change.
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The Glory of Southern Cooking
Baking: From My Home to Yours
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Happy in the Kitchen: The Craft of Cooking, the Art of Eating
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On a clear, brisk February afternoon in Louisville, Kentucky, in the asphalt parking lot of Lynn's Paradise Cafe, we started a fire. All it took to get going was some wadded-up newspaper, a small pyramid of charcoal, and a match. To keep the flame alive, we put our cheeks to the chilly pavement and blew on the bottom layer of coals. Diners leaving the cafe from early dinners glanced at us, chuckled nervously, and hurried along to their cars. When the pile was glowing, we added some split logs and the plume of smoke rising from the pavement became woodsy and fragrant. By the time the sun went down, the flames were hotter and brighter, so we added more oak. Once the fire was roaring, customers in the restaurant became concerned, and the chef, Sarah, in clogs and a kerchief, shuffled out with the buttoned-up manager, Lori, to check on us.
