Reassessing the 1930s South ed. by Karen L. Cox, Sarah E. Gardner (review)

This collection of thirteen essays from contributors with backgrounds in history, art, and literary studies offers a broad and engaging examination of the 1930s South. At the same time, it interrogates notions about the South and the ways those notions were formed. It is an expansive topic that editors Karen L. Cox and Sarah E. Gardner take on, and the volume makes a valuable contribution in fleshing out the conversation. The essays successfully push back against what the editors describe as the artificial but culturally powerful binary that has either pathologized or romanticized the South and instead reveal the complexity, contradiction, and tension in southerners’ responses to change.

It seems to me that the volume’s true value is its probe into how notions of the South are constructed and produced, although that aim is not explicitly framed as such. Readers see this process through the examination of various forms of cultural media, including art, literature, documentary writing and film, theater, visual arts, academic accounts, and news reporting. Additionally, the focus on culture allows the authors to assess new as well as familiar topics from fresh perspectives, helping explain the heft and longevity of particular constructs about the South.

Several essays describe contemporary perspectives that gestured toward southerners’ need for a radically different South. Emily Senefeld shows how the Highlander Folk School helped build support for the labor movement, and she convincingly positions these activities as central to a broader culture of southern radicalism. Robert Hunt Ferguson takes a fascinating look at the radical social vision of William R. Amberson, a physiologist and Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union leader who rejected the entrenched agricultural system and New Deal rural programs. As an alternative, Amberson helped found the Delta Cooperative Farm on the principles of collectivism and interracial cooperation. Coauthors Rebecca Sharpless and Melissa Walker discuss the fieldwork of social scientists Ruth Allen and Margaret Jarman Hagood, who documented rural women’s labor and asserted a powerful gendered indictment of southern economic and social systems as the root of women’s poverty and disempowerment. The essay will be useful for historians interested in comparing this fieldwork with that conducted in other regions by home economists in agricultural extension service, who also pressed gendered critiques.

Technological change shaped conceptions of the South in relationship to modernity, as several chapters illustrate. Two essays closely examine cultural production associated with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Lisa Dorrill offers a fresh take on post office and courthouse murals; they showcased dam engineering, electricity, and conservation measures but failed to depict those affected, thus glossing over social issues the TVA supposedly addressed. Ted Atkinson urges readers to rethink southern encounters with modernism, previously interpreted as antagonistic. He compellingly argues that the documentary The River (1938) and the play Power (1937) exemplified “TVA modernism,” a perspective that viewed technology and infrastructure as crucial to the transformation of the South and its unification with the nation (p. 125). While federally supported cultural production could serve New Deal objectives, Scott L. Matthews illustrates that southerners sought to control notions of place and identity for their own purposes. In response to an alarmist photo essay published in 1938 by Collier’s magazine on sharecropping in Greene County, Georgia, local elites, federal photographers, and sociologist Arthur F. Raper developed an alternative narrative in newspapers, a congressional speech, and Raper’s Tenants of the Almighty (New York, 1943). Douglas E. Thompson also disrupts notions of the South as backward by suggesting that southerners eagerly adopted automobiles but in ways that “fit their understanding of themselves as possessing independence, self-reliance, and freedom” (p. 108).

Another important theme in this collection is race. Nicholas Roland’s excellent essay examines how the organizers of the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition sought to project values of modernity and racial harmony despite the reality of ongoing discrimination, the denigration of black people’s cultural...