The South in Modern America is a lively and illuminating account of the Southern experience since the end of Reconstruction. In the twentieth century, as in the nineteenth, the South has been the ...region most sharply at odds with the rest of the nation. No other part of the country has as clear-cut a sectional image. The interplay between the South, the North, and the rest of the nation represents a rich and instructive part of the United States history, illustrating much of the nation's conflict and tension, the way it has tried to reconcile divergent issues, and its struggles to realize its historical ideals. In this new treatment of modern Southern history, Dewey W. Grantham illuminates the features that make the South a distinctive region while clarifying how it has converged socially and politically with the rest of the country during this century.
Foreword DEWEY W. GRANTHAM
Cry from the Cotton,
01/2017
Book Chapter
The agrarian myth that celebrated a rural America of sturdy and independent yeomen reached the limits of credibility when it came to the southern sharecropper. Victimized by chronic poverty, cultural ...backwardness, and the semifeudal structure of the southern plantation system, hundreds of thousands of “croppers” in the 1930’s found themselves further imperiled by the depression, the mechanization of agriculture, and the New Deal’s crop-reduction program. “I have traveled over most of Europe and part of Africa,” the English novelist Naomi Mitchison declared in 1935, “but I have never seen such terrible sights as I saw yesterday among the sharecroppers of
The Stimulus of War Grantham, Dewey W
The South in Modern America,
07/2001
Book Chapter
The Second World War was a transforming experience for the South and a catalyst in altering its role in the nation. Once again, as in 1898 and 1917–1918, war brought a dramatic demonstration of the ...region’s patriotism and nationalist feeling, and after the United States entered the struggle no other section was more zealous in its support of the war effort. The war encouraged the national economic integration of the South and significantly reduced the economic and social disparities between southerners and other Americans. It led to an infusion of new capital and industry into the South, quickened the
Regionalism and Reform Grantham, Dewey W
The South in Modern America,
07/2001
Book Chapter
If the Great Depression and the New Deal changed the South in many ways, the extraordinary developments of the troubled 1930s also brought unprecedented social and intellectual ferment to the region. ...One manifestation of this ferment was a vigorous outburst of criticism by southerners directed at their own region’s mistakes and inadequacies. The extensive intervention of the federal government in the southern states contributed to a discussion of new ideas and to a sense of new possibilities, as did the reaction of outsiders to conditions in the South. These currents of change stimulated renewed interest in the southern identity and
When the Reconstruction of the American South was formally abandoned in the spring of 1877, a new stage arrived in the sectional conflict of the nineteenth century. The intense North-South antagonism ...of earlier years gave way to a greater measure of intersectional compromise and accommodation. But despite the moderating influences of the new era, sectionalism remained a powerful theme in American life, both in national politics and in the public affairs of states and localities. The consciousness of northerners and southerners was still infused with the dramatic and tragic experiences of the recent past, and politics inevitably reflected these recollections
Until 1960, C. Vann Woodward writes, southern resistance was “able to persuade itself that the civil rights movement was wholly the result of ‘outside agitators,’ that Southern Negroes were contented ...and happy with the ‘Southern way of life,’ that they preferred segregation, and that left to themselves they would never think ofprotesting.”¹ White southerners had reason to be hopeful. The national political scene, reflecting the cautious moderation of Dwight D. Eisenhower, provided few opportunities for major breakthroughs in civil rights; the South continued to exert great influence in Congress; and the liberal coalition committed to racial reform had not yet
In the 1920s the Democrats were returned to their accustomed position as the nation’s minority party. Although southern authority in Washington was diminished somewhat, southerners continued to ...dominate the Democratic party in Congress and to comprise a significant legislative element in dealing with national issues. The South was still the mainstay of the Democratic party in national elections, although as time passed the party gained strength in other regions, particularly the Northeast. This was reflected in a deepening conflict within the party along sectional lines, a conflict that involved cultural differences as well as economic and political objectives. While in
