“The Crusade Is Now Begun in Philadelphia”: Municipal Reformers, Southern Moderates, and African American Politics

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-168
Author(s):  
Julie Davidow
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Corruption ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The Body ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Political Machine ◽  
Full Participation

As the twentieth century dawned, social and political reformers increasingly identified the growing black population in Philadelphia as an important underpinning of the city’s corrupt Republican political machine. This article explores the ways in which Philadelphia’s urban political corruption narrative, with its pointed attacks on black partisanship and electoral participation, developed in dialogue with white southerners’ campaigns to frame Reconstruction as a perversion of democracy. Rather than simply solidifying Jim Crow in the South, northern reformers and southern moderates borrowed from each other to shape and articulate an emerging national consensus that African Americans were unfit for full participation in the body politic.

Cultural Motifs Persist

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-31
Author(s):  
Jenny M. Luke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
General Overview ◽  
Lay Midwifery ◽  
National Perspective ◽  
Jim Crow South

After a general overview of childbirth’s shift to hospital in the early decades of the twentieth century from a national perspective, the chapter narrows its focus to the Jim Crow South. The cultural motifs established during slavery are highlighted as features of African American lay midwifery. A religious calling, an intergenerational female connectedness, and authority to practice were inherent characteristics of the midwife’s role.

Jim Crow Organized Crime

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Cooley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Drug Trafficking ◽  
Illicit Drugs ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Underground Economy ◽  
Street Gangs ◽  
Historical Evolution ◽  
Games Of Chance

This chapter examines the historical evolution of Chicago’s African American underground economy. During the first decades of the twentieth-century games of chance associated with cards and dice were the primary source of gambling revenue in black Chicago. By the early 1930s, this facet of the underground economy had been surpassed by policy, also referred to as “the numbers game.” An important linkage between these two periods was that gambling proprietors funneled some of their profits back into the larger community. Later in the twentieth century, gang-controlled drug trafficking became the primary manifestation of black Chicago’s underground economy. Unlike the earlier period’s relatively violence-free focus on games of chance, the selling of illicit drugs by street gangs turned black Chicago into a battleground.

The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia: Observations on the Commentaries by Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg

Slavic Review ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 512-517
Author(s):  
Leopold h. Haimson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Revolution

Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg have greatly contributed by their respective commentaries to broadening the scope of the issues addressed in my discussion of “The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia” (see Slavic Review [Spring 1988]: 1-20). They have also helped bring out the complexity of the processes involved, after the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917, in the shaping and reshaping of the representations that individuals and groups entertained of themselves, of one another, and of the body politic as a whole.

Sexual Purity, White Men, and Slavery: Emerson and the Self-Reliant Body

Prospects ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 193-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russ Castronovo
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Sexual Behaviors ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
White Men ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Inequality ◽  
White Males ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
Wide Range

As white men surrendered to carnal impulses and lost control of their bodily flows, they became slaves. Such sensational conclusions were standard fare in a 19th-century rhetorical universe where self-reliance as a corporeal principle was also an issue of political gravity. Far from signaling a breakdown of the body's potential to analogize the body politic, the representational slide from Southern bondage to white corporeality is of tremendous national use. The “natural” body – especially in “aberrant” manifestations that violate ethical, hygienic, and democratic codes broadly classed under the dictum of self-reliance – is an enabling construction that allows white men to concentrate on disruptions in their own bodies while overlooking disruption in the body politic. The linguistic inequality that reads the white male's private body as the public's collective body acts in tandem with political inequality by misrepresenting the scope and character of African-American servitude. American liberal reformers participated in a political distortion by talking about the body as though it had the same valence as the body politic. Equipped with a catachrestic sensibility that (mis)understood the citizen's sexuality via national policies on race, a wide range of cultural critics including medical crusaders, abolitionists, educators, and transcendentalists reconceived of the abstract body politic in fairly specific, highly personal, and ultimately privatizing terms. But what happened when that abstract body became culturally particular, when, for instance, the transparency of white males became li bidinally bound to castigated representations of blackness? As an analogy for certain sexual behaviors, slavery plainly suggested the dire consequences of improper corporeal conduct.

The Making of the Modern Death Penalty in Jim Crow North Carolina

2019 ◽  
pp. 192-214
Author(s):  
Seth Kotch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Convictions ◽  
The Impact

focuses on the transition from local public hangings to state-controlled electrocutions in North Carolina in the early twentieth century. The chapter addresses the impact of this shift on African American communities. Although the death penalty had long served as an instrument of racial control, the ritual of a local hanging nevertheless had allowed the condemned and black witnesses a public space to express religious convictions and honor the condemned’s suffering. Once the state seized control of this ritual, African Americans were largely excluded as witnesses. The modern death penalty thus came to represent the racial subjugation of Jim Crow, indeed having more in common with lynchings than legal hangings had.

New Frankensteins; or, the Body Politic

2017 ◽  
pp. 195-207
Author(s):  
Timothy C. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
Gothic Novels

In the introduction to his 2001 anthology of ‘New Scottish Gothic Fiction’, Alan Bissett argues that Gothic ‘has always acted as a way of re-examining the past, and the past is the place where Scotland, a country obsessed with re-examining itself, can view itself whole, vibrant, mythic’ (2001: 6). While virtually every contemporary Scottish author has made use of Gothic elements or tropes in some part of their work, many of the most important recent texts to be labelled ‘Scottish Gothic’ are centrally concerned with such a re-examination of the past. For many authors, however, the past is not to be found in historical events or cultural contexts, but specifically in the interrelation between established Scottish and Gothic literary traditions. Beginning with Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister (1978), one of numerous twentieth-century reworkings of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), many contemporary Gothic novels have explicitly relied on earlier texts; adapting the work of Hogg, Stevenson or even Shelley becomes a way of challenging preconceived notions of stable national and individual identities.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Tyrone McKinley Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
White Male ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Black Women's History ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Over Time

The Introduction presents the book’s main argument that Madam C.J. Walker was not simply a charitable entrepreneur, but rather a great African American and American philanthropist who practiced a distinctive racialized and gendered approach to giving that simultaneously relieved immediately felt needs in her community and thwarted the systemic oppression of the Jim Crow system. The chapter begins by articulating Walker’s embodied philosophy of philanthropy as a “gospel of giving” that started in her twenties when she was a poor, suffering migrant in St. Louis and expanded as she gradually acquired wealth and other resources over time. Her model of giving contrasted greatly with prevailing contemporary approaches by elite white male and female philanthropists who waited until late in their lives to give after accumulating or acquiring wealth. The chapter explores reasons for the absence of Walker and African American donors from major historical fields that have examined philanthropic giving in America. It uses black women’s history to overcome this omission by situating Walker within the larger context of the activism, community work, and fundraising of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black clubwomen, churchwomen, and educators. The chapter constructs generosity as a framework for naming and reclaiming black women as philanthropists. It concludes by noting how Walker, as an example of black women’s giving, challenged core assumptions about the relationship between philanthropy and wealth, women, African Americans, and business. The result is a presentation of black women’s generosity as a long-standing, deeply rooted historical tradition of philanthropy that is alive and well today.

Bare Life and the Resurrection of the Body

2019 ◽  
pp. 344-364
Author(s):  
Gavin Flood
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Value Of Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Life Itself

Vital materialism imbues life with positive value and interfaces with environmentalism. But there is another kind of vitalism in which the political colonizes life in a way that brings into question the value of life itself and brings life into proximity with nihilism. We might call this a dark vitalism, which we see emerging in the European body politic in the twentieth century. While this stream of thought can be read as an attempt to heal the past through creating a utopian and messianic future, it nevertheless negates the values of life and undermines its healing project because fundamentally locked into a form of nihilism, thereby negating life-affirming values. By contrast, spiritual philosophies of life offer a counter-narrative to the dark vitalism that has held such a grip on nations in the last hundred years.

The “Delaware Horror”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis B. Downey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The Other ◽  
The North ◽  
North And South ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter provides a case study of a lynching at the other end of the northeastern seaboard: the mass mob execution by burning of George White, an African American, in Wilmington, Delaware, in June 1903. Delaware had been a slave state that did not join the Confederacy, and while it implemented a Jim Crow system similar to those in neighboring lower Mid-Atlantic states Maryland and Virginia, the state experienced less lynching. Delaware's evolving economy and social relations were strongly tied to the rapidly urbanizing regions of southeastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The chapter's analysis of the role of white and black Protestant ministers in the Wilmington mob execution and its aftermath offers significant insight into a well-publicized early-twentieth-century lynching that occurred somewhere between the North and South.

scholarly journals The Persistence of Character in Twentieth-century British Politics

2020 ◽  
pp. 002200942092258
Author(s):  
Jeremy Nuttall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Moral Politics ◽  
State Expansion ◽  
Moral Growth

Politicians across parties repeatedly agreed that their visions of social improvement rested as much on the promotion of character virtues as on the efficacy of economic systems. Character posed recurring political dilemmas. Ideological dispute over character, as to whether it is formed best through individual exertion or collective support, lies at the heart of the division of politics between right and left. Further, the limits to the people’s character were seen as a constraint upon social progress. Yet, contrary to much historiography, this is not a story of decline from a supposed Victorian heyday of ‘moral politics’. British politics proved notably adaptive in forging updated, optimistic visions, in which the forces of modernity which might have seemed to threaten the moral calibre of the body politic, or of society, whether democracy, state expansion, or, later, ‘individualism’, were recast instead as supportive foundations for the people’s moral growth. If the century has seen a steadily ‘quieter’, less loudly moralizing, more nurturing approach to the encouragement of character, this reflected a growth in the sophistication of the method of advancing character, not a decline in either the political importance accorded to it, or the people’s possession of it.

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