The South at Work

William Garrott Brown

Description

In 1904 William Garrott Brown traveled the American South, investigating the region's political, economic, and social conditions. Using the pen name "Stanton," Brown published twenty epistles in the Boston Evening Transcript detailing his observations. The South at Work is a compilation of these newspaper articles, providing a valuable snapshot of the South as it was simultaneously emerging from post–Civil War economic depression and imposing on African Americans the panoply of Jim Crow laws and customs that sought to exclude them from all but the lowest rungs of Southern society.

A Harvard-educated historian and journalist originally from Alabama, Brown had been commissioned by the Evening Transcript to visit a wide range of locations and to chronicle the region with a greater depth than that of typical travelers' accounts. Some articles featured familiar topics such as a tobacco warehouse in Durham, North Carolina; a textile mill in Columbia, South Carolina; and the vast steel mills at Birmingham. However, Brown also covered atypical enterprises such as citrus farming in Florida, the King Ranch in Texas, and the New Orleans Cotton Exchange. To add perspective, he talked to businessmen and politicians, as well as everyday workers.

In addition to describing the importance of diversifying the South's agricultural economy beyond cotton, Brown addressed race relations and the role of politicians such as James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, the growth of African American communities such as Hayti in Durham, and the role universities played in changing the intellectual climate of the South.

Editor Bruce E. Baker has written an introduction and provided thorough annotations for each of Brown's letters. Baker demonstrates the value of the collection as it touches on racism, moderate progressivism, and accommodation with the political status quo in the South. Baker and Brown's combined work makes The South at Work one of the most detailed and interesting portraits of the region at the beginning of the twentieth century. Publication in book form makes The South at Work conveniently available to students and scholars of modern Southern and American history.

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Universidad Clemson
• Carolina del Sur
• América
• New Departure (Democrats)
• Superiority (short story)
• John Spencer Bassett
• Up from Slavery
• Upstate South Carolina
• Wofford College
• University of South Carolina
• Alton B. Parker
• State
• Benjamin Tillman
• Southern United States
• General officer
• Clemson University
• South
• John C. Calhoun
• Slavery
• South Carolina
• Journalism
• History of the Americas
• Muckraker
• Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands
• Tampa Bay
• General
• Université de Clemson
• American
• United States
• Old South
• Cornelius Vanderbilt
• Université de Caroline du Sud
• Oppression
• FL
• Local
• John Caldwell Calhoun
• KY
• LA
• Alton Parker
• TN
• MS
• SC
• NC
• AR
• VA
• GA
• Caroline du Sud

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 10 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611173765
• Langue: English

Extrait

The South at Work
SOUTHERN CLASSICS SERIES
Mark M. Smith and Peggy G. Hargis, Series Editors
THE SOUTH AT WORK
Observations from 1904
William Garrott Brown
New Introduction by Bruce E. Baker

The University of South Carolina Press
Published in Cooperation with the Institute for Southern Studies of the University of South Carolina
2014 University of South Carolina
Paperback edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2014
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brown, William Garrott, 1868-1913.
The South at work : observations from 1904 / William Garrott Brown ; new introduction by Bruce E. Baker.
pages cm-(Southern classics series)
Compliation of 20 articles previously published in various newspapers and other periodicals in 1904. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61117-375-8 (paperback : alkaline paper)-ISBN 978-1-61117-376-5 (e-book)
1. Southern States-History-1865-1951. 2. Southern States-Social conditions-1865-1945.3. Southern States-Race relations. I. Title.
F215.B8835 2014
306.097509 ;034-dc23 2013042685
Publication of the Southern Classics series is made possible in part by the generous support of the Watson-Brown Foundation.
Contents
Series Editor s Preface
Preface
Introduction
The Letters
Evidences of Important Changes in Its Ideals
New Energy is Evident in Virginia
Durham and the Famous Duke Family
Tolerance Shown in North Carolina
In the Mill Region of South Carolina
Is the Southern Black Man Making Good ?
Florida Recovering from Its Depression
Progress as Noted in Rural Alabama
The Present and the Future of Birmingham
Fiery Governor Vardaman of Mississippi
Mississippi s Land Awaiting Improvement
What the Levees Are Worth to Mississippi
New Orleans and Its Bright Future
Texas, the Land of Mighty Contrasts
The Awakening of Texas in Agriculture
On the Vast Plains of Southern Texas
Educational Endowments in Texas
Texas as a Grain-Growing State
Unreliable Labor Responsible for Its Backwardness
Rehabilitation Is Now Almost Complete
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Series Editor s Preface
In The South at Work: Observations from 1904, William Garrott Brown offered a travel account for a non-southern audience, initially written as a series of twenty letters for the Boston Transcript. A native southerner, graduate of Harvard University, and well-received author, Brown essentially tells about the South. As Bruce E. Baker explains in his helpful and insightful introduction, The South at Work is in part a searching sociological commentary on the race problem. That much of what Brown wrote was tainted by some unpalatable aspects of white southern progressive thinking does not, as Baker points out, dilute the clarity of many of his observations. Brown provides intelligent commentary on a variety of matters critical to the South at the time, including freedom of thought, religion, political progress, and economic development. He offers us a unique perspective on the hopes of the New South at the turn of the twentieth century. That they went largely unrequited in no way diminishes the enduring value of his trenchant observations.
Preface
This is a project that sat for some time in my filing cabinet, waiting for me to find the opportunity and motivation to tackle it. As I got more interested in it, a number of people provided assistance of various forms, large and small. Brian Kelly of Queen s University Belfast kindly sent me photocopies of the original articles. Alex Barber, now at the University of Durham, but then an impecunious doctoral student at Royal Holloway, typed up the letters. Elizabeth Brake was the most organized, helpful transatlantic research assistant anyone could want to hire. The staff of the Vere Harmsworth Library at Oxford were always helpful. I should also thank the Research Committee of the History Department of Royal Holloway, University of London, for granting a term of sabbatical during which the bulk of the research was accomplished. T. J. Stiles, Melynn Glusman, Adam Seipp, Alfredo Vergel, Pat Huber, and Pat Masterson provided assistance and expertise as I tried to track down some of the references in Brown s letters.
Introduction
W ILLIAM G ARROTT B ROWN was one of many ambitious southerners in the late nineteenth century who left his home and made his way to the more prosperous and intellectually sophisticated North, where his talents would find greater outlets and rewards. Yet like many southerners, he retained his affection for the South and a desire to, as Shreve McCannon would urge Quentin Compson, tell about the South. 1 Born in Marion, Alabama, in 1868, Brown was educated in local schools and then, from 1883 to 1886, attended Howard College, a Baptist university that later became Samford University. After dabbling in teaching and journalism in Alabama, Brown headed to Harvard, graduating in 1891. Brown took a job as the university s archivist in 1892 and settled down to an intellectual life in Cambridge, devoting increasing attention to writing history by the end of the decade. In the early years of the twentieth century, Brown published a number of successful books about nineteenth-century American history, including biographies of Andrew Jackson, Stephen Douglas, and Oliver Ellsworth. 2 During this time he also published widely in magazines on history, especially the history of the South, and commentary on contemporary issues relating to the South, including race relations.
Brown seems to have come up with the idea of touring the South and writing a series of articles about the region in autumn 1903, partly as a way of funding a trip that he hoped would improve his failing health. He proposed a series of articles on the Negro question to both the Independent and the Outlook but eventually struck a deal with the editor of the Boston Evening Transcript. 3 The Transcript was, as one of its editors from that period recalled, of the old Boston, the Boston that is fading, and it prided itself on attracting some of the best writers. 4 At the same time, the Transcript wanted to emphasize news -new things, new enterprises, new aspects of old problems and prospects for the future, in part because so many people imagine that the Transcript is still a repository of reminiscences. 5 The format was not a new one for the Transcript. In autumn 1903, the newspaper had commissioned Canadian journalist Edward William Thomson to write a series entitled The Buoyant Northwest that began in St. Paul, Minnesota, and ended in Regina, Canada. 6 By February 1904 Brown had agreed to write a series of twenty articles, for which he would be paid four hundred dollars. 7
When conceiving of the series of articles, Brown had a definite model in mind, but his letters can also be compared to other categories of writing about the South around the beginning of the twentieth century. Between 1852 and 1854, the polymath Frederick Law Olmsted made two extended trips through most of the states of the South, recording his observations and interactions with the region s inhabitants. Olmsted s careful attention to all levels of society, from planters to poor white people and even slaves, set him apart from many other writers of travel literature about the South. His accounts were published in newspapers and then as three books between 1856 and 1860. 8 Brown clearly wanted to model his 1904 journey on Olmsted s, illustrating what war and the passage of a half century had done to the region.
Assistant editor Frank B. Tracy, however, was less than enthusiastic about this approach. What we want to know, he wrote, is how the South is picking up now and how it has improved in the last ten years, rather than how it has improved since the war. 9 But the very nature of Brown s trip through the South and its firsthand observations put it in a broader category of travel accounts describing the postbellum South for a non-southern audience. 10 Reconstruction saw some such works, such as Sidney Andrews s book about the South in late 1865 and, later, James S. Pike s critical comments on South Carolina s political condition in 1873 and Edward King s comprehensive description of the region in 1873 and 1874. 11 With the shift of the nation s political focus after the end of Reconstruction, the flow of travel accounts about the South decreased, but as historian Thomas D. Clark observes, After 1900, however, the region again found itself on the grand tour, and hundreds of Americans and foreign visitors came in search of personal pleasure, social readjustment, economic opportunity, and the Negro. 12 Another very popular and influential work of travel literature about America, not just the South, that may have influenced Brown came from Princeton graduate Walter A. Wyckoff. He spent eighteen months in the early 1890s working his way across the country from Connecticut to California as a day laborer and then wrote three books about his experiences and went on to lecture on political science at Princeton until his death in 1908. 13
The South at Work also fits comfortably into a genre of books that used a sociological approach to address the race problem in the South, books such as Booker T. Washington s autobiography, Up from Slavery, and W. E. B. Du Bois s 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk. Other books combined observation with academically informed analysis. Carl Kelsey carried out field research on black farmers in the South for his sociology dissertation, published in 1903. 14 In some ways Brown