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Reading Southern Poverty between the Wars, 1918-1939

2007; Southern Historical Association; Volume: 73; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/27649623

2325-6893

James H. Tuten, Richard Godden, Martin Crawford,

American Environmental and Regional History

Franklin D. Roosevelt once described South as the nation's number one economic problem. These twelve original, interdisciplinary essays on southern indigence between World Wars share a conviction that poverty is not just a dilemma of marketplace but also a cultural and political construction. Although previous studies have examined web of coercive social relations in which sharecroppers, wage laborers, and other poor southerners were held in place, this volume opens up a new perspective. These essays show that professed forces of change and modernization in South - writers, photographers, activists, social scientists, and policymakers - often subtly upheld structures by which southern labor was being exploited. Planters, politicians, and others who enforced southern economic and social status quo not only relied on bigotry but also manipulated deeply held American beliefs about sturdy yeoman nobility and sanctity of farm and family. Conversely, any threats to system were tarred with imagery of big cities, northerners, and organized labor. The essays expose vestiges of these beliefs in sources as varied as photographs from Farm Security Administration, statistics for incarceration and child labor, and writings of Grace Lumpkin, Ellen Glasgow, and Erskine Caldwell. This volume shows that those who work to eradicate poverty - and even victims of poverty themselves - can hesitate to cross line of race, gender, memory, or tradition in pursuit of their goal.