The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930 by Natalie J. Ring (review)

One of the enduring debates in postbellum scholarship concerns the question of southern distinctiveness: the extent to which the “New South” was different and separate, both from the society that preceded it and the one that shared its northern border. As Howard Rabinowitz once observed, scholars have approached these questions with a variety of conceptual frameworks and “categories in which to help package the past.”¹ Given their different frames of reference, it’s not surprising that historians have also reached widely divergent conclusions about the nature of southern change and the meaning of national reconciliation.

In The Problem South, Natalie Ring sheds creative new light on this long-standing debate. Her primary frame of reference is not really the South, in the sense that she doesn’t assess the vitality of the southern economy, the fairness of the political landscape, or everyday struggles over developing laws of segregation. Yet she does weigh in. Alongside the trend toward sectional reunification around the turn of the century, Ring says, there was a “broader historical narrative about the South’s differentness from the nation. An equally powerful and opposing set of representations of the South as a backward region played counterpoint to the nostalgic image of the reconciled New South” (5–6). The architects of that narrative, she says, were a collection of mostly northern reformers, philanthropists, and social scientists who drew attention to what was commonly known as the “southern problem.”

Ring’s book is a study of these reformers and their aspiration to “readjust” the South. And in that sense, her main frame of reference is the growth of the Progressive Era state. The notion that northern liberals wanted to reform the South isn’t a new finding. What makes Ring’s study unique is that she considers that reformist impulse in more cohesive terms and puts their southern story in conversation with scholarship about the growth of the modern state. Looking at southern distinctiveness primarily in discursive and representational terms—rather than tangible, historical ones—the author avers that the South was a paradox of progress and poverty. But it was a paradox that northern reformers also constructed—at least in part—as they worked to entrench their corporate liberal values. As Ring notes, “The consolidation of early twentieth-century liberalism entailed the creation of a persuasive image of regional backwardness that could then be resolved through economic and social reform” (6).

As Ring’s chapters demonstrate, the reformist ambition to fix the South expressed itself through various organizational initiatives and cultural discussions—around public health and disease, agriculture, education, and race. Broadly speaking, many of these topics have been standard yardsticks in the change/continuity debate. Yet Ring is mainly interested in the ways they served the reformist agenda of “reshaping the South in the likeness of the North” (131). In her chapter on King Cotton, for example, she explores the career of Seaman A. Knapp, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s special agent for the promotion of agriculture in the South, who traveled through the South to promote his farm demonstration program and to teach farmers the techniques of “scientific” agriculture. In a larger sense, Ring writes, “the rural uplift of the South inevitably made for better national democratic citizens as well as contributed to the economic welfare of the nation” (130). In her chapter on education, the author identifies a similarly nationalist agenda behind familiar efforts like the General Education Board and the Ogden movement. Such reforms, Ring argues, “underscored the imperative need to educate white children in preparation for assuming their roles as white citizens in the American nation-state” (173).

While The Problem South repackages southern distinctiveness as a political tool of national elites, it also argues that this Progressive impulse had an important global dimension. Northern reformers reinforced their narrative of distinctiveness through reference to...