Discovering the South: Race, Region, and the Transformation of American Liberalism

FAIN: FA-55771-11

Jennifer Lynn Ritterhouse
Utah State University (Logan, UT 84322-1400)

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, American liberals began to focus on race issues to a greater extent than ever before. Historians such as Glenda Gilmore and Doug Rossinow attribute this transformation in political philosophy to the influence of leftists and left-liberals. My book, Discovering the South, will examine the same process from a "middle" perspective, centering on white southern liberal Jonathan Daniels, who in the early 1940s served President Franklin Roosevelt as an important adviser on domestic race relations. Discovering the South will begin by retracing the most illuminating and formative parts of a 1937 tour of the South that Daniels undertook for his 1938 book, A Southerner Discovers the South. A third section will then examine Daniels's work in Washington and the broader discussions of race issues within the Democratic Party. The result will be an engaging narrative that sheds light on an important political realignment and black and white southerners' role in it.

Media Coverage

Revisiting Jonathan Daniels’ tour of the 1930s South (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Rob Christensen
Publication: Raleigh News and Observer
Date: 4/21/2017
URL: http://www.newsobserver.com/entertainment/books/article145863649.html

"Driving Through a Changing South" (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Frank Stasio
Publication: The State of Things
Date: 3/15/2017
URL: http://wunc.org/post/driving-through-changing-south#stream/0

Associated Products

Woman flogged: Willie Sue Blagden, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and how an impulse for story led to a historiographical corrective (Article)
Title: Woman flogged: Willie Sue Blagden, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and how an impulse for story led to a historiographical corrective
Author: Jennifer Ritterhouse
Abstract: The June 1936 flogging of Willie Sue Blagden, a middle-class white woman, by anti-union planters elicited public sympathy and political support for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU). Nevertheless, Blagden herself has been treated dismissively in the scholarly literature on the STFU. Drawn to the flogging story as a story, the author uncovered evidence that other historians have overlooked. This article presents a more accurate picture of Blagden to illustrate how historians' desire to write creatively and accessibly can lead to better, and not simply more entertaining, scholarship.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13642529.2014.873588
Primary URL Description: Article abstract on the online platform for Taylor & Francis Group content
Secondary URL: http://www.tandfonline.com.mutex.gmu.edu/doi/full/10.1080/13642529.2014.873588
Secondary URL Description: Full text of the article accessed through George Mason University subscription
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice
Publisher: Taylor & Francis

"To Alter Patterns of Southern Living": Jonathan Daniels's A Southerner Discovers the South in the Evolution of Racial Liberalism (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "To Alter Patterns of Southern Living": Jonathan Daniels's A Southerner Discovers the South in the Evolution of Racial Liberalism
Author: Jennifer Ritterhouse
Abstract: Part of a panel on "Re-Evaluating Southern Liberalism," this paper examines Jonathan Daniels's 1938 book A Southerner Discovers the South not only for its role in his own evolution as a liberal, but also for its impact on the American political scene. As a bestseller that appeared within days of President Franklin Roosevelt's statement that the South was "the Nation's No. 1 economic problem," Daniels's book and the "regionalist liberal" perspective it embodied were more provocative and influential than historians have recognized.
Date: 11/14/2015
Primary URL: http://sha.uga.edu/2015%20Program.pdf
Primary URL Description: Conference program
Conference Name: Southern Historical Association annual meeting

"One of the Last of the Old Time Masters of Men Out of the Old Time South": Charles F. DeBardeleben and Labor Politics in Birmingham (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "One of the Last of the Old Time Masters of Men Out of the Old Time South": Charles F. DeBardeleben and Labor Politics in Birmingham
Author: Jennifer Ritterhouse
Abstract: Jonathan Daniels's 1937 interview with Birmingham industrialist Charles F. DeBardeleben, president of the Alabama Fuel and Iron Company, provides a window onto the labor conflicts in Depression-era Birmingham. Daniels considered DeBardeleben an old-time paternalist but also noted his political allegiance to Republican candidate Alf Landon in 1936. Focusing on DeBardeleben thus helps us understand connections between the history of labor relations in the South and the full-scale political realignment among white southerners that would be evident by the 1960s.
Date: 3/6/2015
Primary URL: https://southernlaborstudies.org/program-2015-southern-labor-studies-conference/
Primary URL Description: Conference program
Conference Name: 2015 Southern Labor Studies Conference

Discovering the South: One Man's Travels Through a Changing America in the 1930s (Book)
Title: Discovering the South: One Man's Travels Through a Changing America in the 1930s
Author: Jennifer Ritterhouse
Abstract: During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. It was also a battlefield on which forces for and against social change were starting to form. For a white southern liberal like Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, it was a fascinating moment to explore. Attuned to culture as well as politics, Daniels knew the true South lay somewhere between Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. On May 5, 1937, he set out to find it, driving thousands of miles in his trusty Plymouth and ultimately interviewing even Mitchell herself. In Discovering the South historian Jennifer Ritterhouse pieces together Daniels's unpublished notes from his tour along with his published writings and a wealth of archival evidence to put this one man's journey through a South in transition into a larger context. Daniels's well chosen itinerary brought him face to face with the full range of political and cultural possibilities in the South of the 1930s, from New Deal liberalism and social planning in the Tennessee Valley Authority, to Communist agitation in the Scottsboro case, to planters' and industrialists' reactionary worldview and repressive violence. The result is a lively narrative of black and white southerners fighting for and against democratic social change at the start of the nation's long civil rights era. For more information on this book, see www.discoveringthesouth.org.
Year: 2017
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1469630946
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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