I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century

Contents

v contents Series Editor’s Preface   ix Introduction  xi C hapter I  Grandmother Smith’s Plantation 1 Life on a prosperous cotton plantation in South Carolina in the nineties .The story begins with a matriarchal grandmother and her turbulent family, among whom were Bishop Cote Smith and the present Senior Senator from South Carolina, Cotton Ed Smith, tells something of the prejudices early acquired by a small boy in a state which was in its nature still eighteenth century, something of the relation between Negroes and whites, of “po’ white trash,”and of Negroes living in their own economy. C hapter II  Columbia 41 Life in a Methodist parsonage: an account of the predicament of a Protestant preacher’s family who were obliged to sit backstage and watch a show that they didn’t believe in, under the watchful eyes, however, of the faithful.From parsonage to life in the Columbia Female College,of which the author’s father became president in 1892, where young ladies were incarcerateduntiltheyshouldbemarried.AnaccountofColumbia,which was a typical Southern city, that is, an enlarged country town, its social life and politics. Ben Tillman, the spiritual progenitor of Huey Long; Wade Hampton, the last of the great aristocrats to hold office; James vi C ontents Gordon Coogler, author of “Purely Original Verse”—these and other characters. C hapter III   Grandmother Rice’s Plantation 108 This is in sharp contrast to the first chapter, for it tells how people lived on a plantation that was poverty-stricken and run down, and ruled by another matriarchy, of aunts, who clung to a tenuous tradition of gentility even while they worked in the cotton fields. The dominance of Charleston and Charlestonian prejudices in the Low Country. Relics from the time when the plantation had been a self-contained economic unit, and ways of doing things that had not changed in two hundred years,as well as ways of thinking.An account of the boyhood and rearing of the author’s father, Rev. John A. Rice, and of his doctor father before him, and an aunt by marriage who refused to be a lady. C hapter IV  Montgomery 159 First acquaintance with the “New South,” which was the Old South falling to pieces. The beginning of the new aristocracy, the sheets-andpillow -case aristocracy, and the downfall of the old. The Methodist Church, a curious mixture of despotism, oligarchy, and democracy, and some account of the resulting difficulties of the author’s father, who had recently returned from the University of Chicago, tainted with the “Higher Criticism”that would soon bring him into conflict with Bishop Warren Candler, brother of Coca-Cola Candler. The Negro in the city, game for every unscrupulous white man. The rise of the Middle Class in the South. C hapter V   Webb School 197 The oldest boys’school in the South, among whose graduates were more Rhodes Scholars than of any school in the world. Sawney Webb, one of the founders, disciplinarian and Confederate soldier, who, with his brother John Webb,built the school to where it had no rival in the South C ontents vii and then almost destroyed it when he was called a “great man.” John Webb,scholar,who gave the boys the finish that made them conspicuous in college but who was too modest to have allowed anyone to call him great. What it takes to be a teacher. C hapter VI   Interlude Among the Half-Castes 223 New Orleans, half French, half pushing, grasping American. A city of gamblers. A touch of the “tar brush”—the story of two girls, with a happy ending.Negroes in another kind of city.Adventures of a tenement house inspector.Tulane,a typical dead university.How a Rhodes Scholar was elected thirty years ago. C hapter VII   Oxford and Rhodes Scholars 242 How an American, born in the eighteenth century, found himself in it again; but, having entered the nineteenth meanwhile, resulting discomfort . An attempt to find out what the English worship.The Oxford don, who lived in no time. Some Rhodes Scholars, among them Elmer Davis, Edwin Hubbel, Christopher Morley. The promise, and performance of Rhodes Scholars, who have compassed a narrow orbit of good and evil. The influence on American education of a misunderstanding of Oxford. C hapter VIII    Sam Avery and the University 269 of Nebraska After an interval at the University of Chicago, eight years of teaching in...