Charleston and the Great Depression

Kieran W. Taylor

Description

A chronicle of perseverance and hope in the face of economic crises and political change

Charleston and the Great Depression tells many stories of the city during the 1930s—an era of tremendous want, hope, and change—through a collection of forty annotated primary documents. Included are letters, personal accounts, organizational reports, meeting minutes, speeches, photographs, oral history excerpts, and trial transcripts. Together they reveal the various ways in which ordinary lowcountry residents—largely excluded from formal politics—responded to the era's economic and social crises and made for themselves a "New Deal."

Arranged in chronological order, the documents include Mayor Burnet R. Maybank's 1931 inaugural address, in which the thirty-two-year-old merchant-turned-politician warned grimly of worsening hardship; the trial testimony of Benjamin Rivers, an African American worker executed by the state after being convicted of murdering a Charleston police officer; horror writer H. P. Lovecraft's detailed walking tour of the city, in which the visiting New Englander painted a fascinating but romanticized portrait of Charleston that somehow managed to overlook the adversities facing the local population; and Susan Hamilton's powerful and contradictory memories of her enslavement, gathered as part of the Federal Writers Project.

The Great Depression was an era of economic crises and political change but was also a period of great hope and possibility as Americans from across the political spectrum persevered through hard times, driven by the conviction that government power could and should be used to alleviate suffering and create opportunities to better people's lives. These documents capture the voices of diverse Charleston residents—from farmers and dockworkers to students, ministers, public officials, and social workers—as they struggled and strove for a better city and a better country.

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Howard Phillips Lovecraft
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• Gonorrhea
• BellSouth Telecommunications
• Lorena Hickok
• Scrip
• Foreclosure
• State
• Desperation
• South
• Desegregation
• Stock market crash
• Slave rebellion
• Abolitionism
• World War II
• Unemployment
• Typhoid fever
• Tuberculosis
• Slavery
• Recession
• History of the Americas
• United States
• V.
• Oppression
• FL
• Local
• KY
• LA
• TN
• MS
• SC
• NC
• AR
• Herbert Hoover
• VA
• GA
• H. P. Lovecraft
• Seconde Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 25 avril 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611178654
• Langue: English

Extrait

Charleston and the Great Depression
Charleston and the Great Depression
A Documentary History, 1929-1941

EDITED BY
Kieran W. Taylor

The University of South Carolina Press
2018 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18
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 978-1-61117-864-7 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-865-4 (ebook)
Front cover illustration: Norma Mazo, Payday , 1935
Contents
Acknowledgments
Editorial Principles and Practices
Chronology
Introduction
1930
Fong Lee Wong to Laura Bragg, 4 March 1930
Eleanor Loeb Halsey, Narrative Report, Charleston County Tuberculosis Association, August 1930
1931
The State of South Carolina v. Ray Laurens , 12 October 1931
Burnet R. Maybank, Inaugural Address, 14 December 1931
1932
The City Council of Charleston, Minutes, 26 January 1932
Ella L. Smyrl to Cordella A. Winn, 26 January 1932
William McKinley Bowman to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 25 November 1932
1933-1934
Burnet R. Maybank to John L. M. Irby, 25 September 1933
John L. M. Irby to Burnet R. Maybank, 25 September 1933
Lorena A. Hickok to Harry L. Hopkins, 10 February 1934
1935
Norma Mazo, Payday , 1935
Benjamin F. Cox, Avery Institute, Annual Report, August 1935
Franklin D. Roosevelt to Clergy, 24 September 1935
A. D. Prentiss to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 27 September 1935
DuBose Heyward, Porgy and Bess Return on Wings of Song, October 1935
Elijah J. Curry to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 5 October 1935
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Remarks at the Citadel: The Military College of South Carolina, 23 October 1935
1936
H. P. Lovecraft to Herman Charles Koenig, 12 January 1936
Walker Evans, 19th Century Shop-Front, Charleston, S.C ., March 1936
Allen Jones Jr., Diary, 6 March 1936
The State v. Benjamin J. Rivers , 25 September 1936
1937
John L. M. Irby to William Watts Ball, 26 May 1937
Susan Calder Hamilton, Interview by Augustus Ladson, May-June 1937
Susan Calder Hamilton, Interview by Jessie A. Butler, 6 July 1937
Susan Calder Hamilton, Interview by Jessie A. Butler, November 1937
Program, The Recruiting Officer , Dock Street Theatre Dedication, 26 November 1937
1938-1940
Photographs from the Charleston Tornadoes, September 1938
Marion Post Wolcott, Negro Home near Charleston, South Carolina , December 1938
Marion Post Wolcott, The Cook on a Fishing Boat in Charleston, South Carolina, Peeling Potatoes for Christmas Dinner , 25 December 1938
Ruby and John Lomax, Field Notes, 6-8 June 1939
Box Score, Columbus Red Birds vs. Charleston Rebels, 24 July 1940
1941
Leon Banov to Burnet R. Maybank, 15 November 1941
Elizabeth Maybank to Joseph Maybank, 14 December 1941
Memories of the Great Depression, 1996-2012
Gordan B. Stine, Interview by Dale Rosengarten, 19 February 1996
Abe Dumas, Interview by Michael Grossman, 14 December 1996
Shera Lee Ellison Berlin, Interview by Dale Rosengarten and Michael Grossman, 16 April 1997
William F. Ladson, Interview by Kieran W. Taylor, 13 May 2009
Anne Marie Gilliard, Interview by Clarissa D. Brown, 2 October 2011
Virginia Bonnette, Interview by Virginia Ellison and Kieran W. Taylor, 15 March 2012
Henry W. Fleming, Interview by Danielle Lightner, 17 March 2012
Herman Stramm, Interview by Luke Yoder, 19 March 2012
Index
Acknowledgments
This volume is the product of a collaborative research project that began in two sections of Introduction to the Discipline of History, an undergraduate class that I taught at the Citadel in the fall of 2014. I designed the course assignments to provide students with the opportunity to work on a large, publishable historical research project. After selecting primary materials for the collection, I assigned each student one or two documents, which they transcribed, researched, and annotated. The course required both group work and intensive one-on-one tutorials, during which we discussed standard transcription practices, editorial principles, research methods, and historical writing. I wanted the students to learn the discipline of history through the practice of history. I chose Charleston and Great Depression as the project theme because of the lack of historical writing on the period and the easy accessibilty of local source material. I also did so as a political intervention. My idea was to expose my students to a period in U.S. history that would be both familiar and unfamiliar to them. The students have ideas about the Great Depression that are a part of our shared national memory. They may have even heard firsthand stories of the 1930s from grandparents or great-grandparents. Like their grandparents and great-grandparents, my students have lived through a period of tremendous economic upheaval and considerable hardship-the recession of 2008-2009 and its aftermath-and they continue to face an uncertain job market and troubling economic trends that include an unsustainable gap between the rich and poor. Unlike their elders, however, they live in a period of widespread cynicism regarding government and the political system. Despite their many differences and disagreements, the vast majority of Americans subscribed to Franklin D. Roosevelt s New Deal. They believed in the idea that government power could and should be used to improve people s lives. I wanted to immerse my students in those more hopeful politics of the 1930s, a period in which Americans believed that politics should serve as an expression of the commonweal. How successful was my intervention? I do not know. It will be up to them to draw their own lessons from the Great Depression. I do know that the following women and men were excellent colleagues-hard working, cooperative, and patient: Preston Abernathy, Ryan Abts, Tjark Aldeborgh, Michael Bell, Sean Brennan, William Brown, Sophie-Leigh Clark, Gregory Copplin, William Denman, Taylor Evans, Ra Shaud Graham, Logan Higaki, Thomas Jordan, Anthony Kniffin, Dillon Luedtke, Derek Massey, William Maxwell, Joshua Park, Frost Parker, Monica Paulk, John Pferdmenges, Colin Poppert, William Richardson, Landon Rohrer, Matthew Russell, Joshua Scaife, Megan Sowell, Daniel Trimnal, Joseph Vicci, Maureen Wilkinson, and Justine Zukowski. They all made significant editorial contributions to this volume.
Additionally, several graduate assistants verified transcriptions and followed up on many vague research leads that I provided them. They include Orianna Baham, John Clark, and Matt Carroll, who also enlisted the help of Amanda Graves Carroll. The smart and unflappable Ariel Washington was a model research assistant in the earliest phases of this project. I look forward to working with her again when she finishes her doctoral studies in Chapel Hill.
The following Charleston-area archivists were very generous in helping me locate relevant documents, providing necessary publication permissions, and responding to my research queries: Barrye Brown, Karen Emmons, Mary Jo Fairchild, David Goble, Kathleen Gray, Harlan Greene, Susan Hoffius, Meg Moughan, Elaine Robbins, Dale Rosengarten, Rebecca Schultz, Aaron Spelbring, and Deborah Turkewitz. We are spoiled to have a group of such knowledgeable and generous archivists here in Charleston. I also relied on the generosity of a number of historians in producing the introduction and annotations. On short notice, Bruce Baker, Stephen Hoffius, and Bo Moore offered valuable feedback on the introduction; and several other scholars drew on their expertise to offer guidance on various aspects of the manuscript. They include Tenisha Armstrong, Clarissa Brown, Rachel Donaldson, Erik Gellman, S. T. Joshi, Keith Knapp, Alex Moore, and John Sacca. The Citadel Foundation has provided excellent research support for this project and all of my research efforts, as has the Department of History.
Finally, personal thanks are in order to colleagues and friends who have overlooked my neglect of various professional and community-organizing responsibilities, especially in this last month or two of manuscript preparation. They include Marina Lopez, Christine Nelson, and Leonard Riley Jr.. Kimberly Clifton has been similarly tolerant on the home front, and for her patience, love, and support I will always be grateful.
Editorial Principles and Practices
Each document selected for publication in this volume provides a window into events and themes related to life in Charleston in the 1930s. Their inclusion is intended to spotlight the rich body of primary source material available to scholars of the region s history and to encourage further study in related subject areas. The documents include correspondence, speech transcripts, photographs, artwork, oral histories, organizational reports, diaries, newspaper items, magazine articles, and court documents. Many of the themes they address will be familiar to students of the Great Depression, including stories of human suffering, public health challenges, and various New Deal initiatives. But there is much here that will be less familiar, even to specialists in local history.
A title, date, and place of origin introduce each document. The existing titles of documents are used when available and are designated by quotation marks or italics. For documents that are untitled in their original form, I have created descriptive titles that reflect their content (for example, Burnet R. Maybank to Joh