A Red-Headed Woman Immaculate and Immediate from the Beauty Parlor

This chapter examines Jonathan Daniels's negative reaction to visiting Atlanta and meeting Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell in June 1937. Daniels perceived Atlanta as the capital of the New South but was disappointed to see so much social distance between rich and poor, white and black, which seemed reminiscent of Old South social hierarchies. Mitchell, too, struck him as person full of contradictions. The vulgarity of her speech reminded him of the flappers or New Women of the 1920s, yet she had written a romantic epic of the Old South and seemed disappointingly conventional, rigid, and small-minded. Daniels had little insight into the gender struggles of white southern women of his and Mitchell's generation, but their ideological differences in relation to the New Deal were evident. Mitchell was very angry that Daniels included excerpts of their conversation in A Southerner Discovers the South without her permission, but the fact that he did not name her in the book resulted in very few readers recognizing her.

This Division between Faith in Democracy and Power Descending from Authority

This chapter traces the first leg of Jonathan Daniels's trip through the textile mill towns of North and South Carolina and into Tennessee. His ambivalent attitude toward working-class white southerners related to the popularity of poor-white caricatures in Erskine Caldwell's novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre. Daniels saw the impact of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and pondered the effects of the Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville, Norris, and Chattanooga. TVA commissioner David Lilienthal reassured him that New Deal programs were committed to grassroots democracy rather than social planning by outsiders. Yet Daniels was conscious of the challenges to segregation and white supremacy the New Deal was likely to bring. Wary of federal intervention in the South, Daniels looked to the road ahead with even greater concerns about far left and far right, Communist and proto-fascist, alternatives.

We So-Called Free Moderns

This chapter provides biographical background on Jonathan Daniels. His education at the University of North Carolina, ambitions as a novelist, and publication of Clash of Angels (1930) are highlighted. The death in childbirth of his first wife, Elizabeth Bridgers Daniels, made it difficult for the grieving Daniels to complete a second, satirical novel that might have been his entry into the developing Southern Renaissance alongside his former classmate Thomas Wolfe. The liberal-minded editorials Daniels wrote after taking over from his father as editor of the Raleigh News and Observer in 1933 are contrasted with Josephus Daniels's role in North Carolina's "white supremacy campaign" of 1898 that resulted in the Wilmington massacre. Jonathan's liberalism reflected the influence of other white southern liberals such as Regionalist sociologist Howard Odum and publisher W. T. Couch. New York editor Harold Strauss encouraged Daniels to write a book about the South, resulting in his journey.

As Furious as the Last Horseman of a Legion of the Bitter-End

This chapter centers on Daniels's interviews with Birmingham industrialist Charles F. DeBardeleben and labor organizer William Mitch of the United Mine Workers (UMW) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). DeBardeleben's biography begins with his grandfather, Daniel Pratt, and his father, Henry Fairchild DeBardeleben. Both were industrialists whose investments in coal, iron, and steel contributed to the development of Birmingham. Charles F. DeBardeleben followed in his father's footsteps as a staunch antiunionist. He claimed to be a paternalist yet used fences and armed guards to isolate his workers, resulting in a deadly shooting at the Acmar mine of his Alabama Fuel and Iron Company in 1935. Meanwhile, the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933 facilitated the growth of the CIO, and William Mitch's efforts to cultivate interracial unionism in Birmingham in the 1930s were largely successful. The chapter concludes by noting that DeBardeleben's alleged fascist ties are difficult to document and seem less significant than his anticommunist rhetoric and switch to the Republican Party, both of which provide an early glimpse of tactics recalcitrant white southerners would employ to prevent social and racial change in the post-World War II years.

The Most Interesting Man I Met

This chapter focuses on Daniels's encounter with Victor C. Turner Sr., who worked for the Negro Cooperative Extension System of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Turner's biography as a representative of the educated black middle class is presented, including his participation in an officers' training program at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, during World War I. Turner told Daniels about racial violence and debt peonage in Lowndes County, Alabama, mentioning a planter named Dickson. Historical research connects a peonage case involving Lowndes County sheriff J.W. Dickson in 1903 with a case involving his younger brother, Robert Stiles Dickson Sr., in 1946. Neither brother was ever prosecuted, and the younger one was especially socially prominent. The chapter analyses Daniels's portrayal of Turner and Dickson, who remain anonymous in A Southerner Discovers the South. He sought confirmation of Turner's story from white Alabamans, including Birmingham newspaper editor James E. Chappell. Chappell's daughter Mary had taught at the Calhoun Colored School in Lowndes County and seemed to represent a new social consciousness among younger white southerners. However, another journalist's account of the suppression of the black Sharecroppers Union in 1932 reiterated that planter violence was endemic in the Alabama Black Belt.

A Quaint and Quixotic Group of Gentlemen

This chapter begins by contrasting Daniels's open-minded, documentary approach to his travels through the South with the staunch, conservative convictions of Nashville Agrarian Donald Davidson. The chapter provides an overview of Agrarian thought in I'll Take My Stand and subsequent writings, as well as an understanding of how the thinking of Howard Odum, Rupert Vance, and other southern Regionalists differed. The Southern Policy Committee, fostered by Francis Pickens Miller, brought the Agrarians and Regionalists into direct debate. By the late 1930s, the Agrarian group had disbanded, but Davidson kept the faith while becoming increasingly reactionary on racial issues. In 1955 he became the founding president of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government, an organization dedicated to resisting the integration of public schools. Even by 1937, Daniels could sense that Davidson felt a deep sadness over the passing of his idealized, traditional South.

Conclusion

This chapter shows how race-baiting, red-baiting, and white southern liberals' own ambivalence made it impossible for a broad-based coalition to lead an ongoing fight for democratic social change, despite the large number of people who had come together at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) in 1938. Activists like Virginia Durr lobbied for anti-poll tax bills in the early 1940s without success. Meanwhile, New Deal policies gave way to mobilization for World War II, which favoured the South with defense-related and infrastructure spending but did not challenge the Jim Crow system. Black civil rights activists like A. Philip Randolph and the lawyers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the lead in a Long Civil Rights Movement that earlier efforts to bring change to the South had helped to make possible. Jonathan Daniels was never an activist but became increasingly supportive of civil rights initiatives after working as an aide to Franklin Roosevelt from 1943-1945. The chapter describes his wartime work and briefly traces the remainder of his career, including the reissue of A Southerner Discovers the South in 1970 and his death in 1981.

Tenants Are Able to Hold Their Heads a Little Higher

This chapter begins with Daniels's interview with Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) president J. R. Butler, then presents an overview of the union's founding and early years from 1934-1937. The union's struggles to achieve biracial unity and reconcile white leaders' Socialist vision with rank-and-file members' preference for independent landownership within the capitalist system are explored. The chapter briefly explains the disruptive effects of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and divisions within the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and the Department of Agricultural. Planters' violent reprisals against the STFU are also a major theme. The chapter recounts Daniels's visits to the Dyess Colony in Arkansas and the Delta Cooperative Farm at Hillhouse, Mississippi. Delta's relationship to the subsequent Providence Farm community in Holmes County, Mississippi, is noted. The STFU declined after its 1937 merger with the United Cannery, Agriculture, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPWA), which was affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Meanwhile, the creation of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) brought belated and ultimately inadequate federal attention to the problems of sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

The Newly Exciting Question of the Possibility of Democracy

This chapter provides a close reading of Daniels's conclusions in A Southerner Discovers the South, which emphasize the need for more federal engagement and regional planning designed to provide opportunity--not social engineering--for ordinary black and white southerners. Daniels also wanted to see greater fairness in railroad freight rates and the negotiation of tariffs so that the industrialized North did not benefit at the agricultural South's expense. His book received glowing reviews from most readers, white and black, with some critiques from both the left and the right as well as from individuals such as Allen Tate who felt Daniels had misrepresented him. Black reader Wilhelmina Roberts criticized Daniels for failing to show the accomplishments of educated African Americans. Others saw his book as especially valuable to New Deal and southern liberal efforts to improve the South, associating it with the National Emergency Council's Report on the Economic Conditions of the South, Franklin Roosevelt's attempt to "purge" conservative southern senators, and the formation of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. In 1938, Life magazine sent photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt on a trip with Daniels to retrace his journey for a photo-essay that was never published.

Naked and Hot as If She Were Stripped in the Sun

This chapter tells the story of the 1936 flogging of Willie Sue Blagden, a white, middle-class supporter of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) who became a target of antiunion violence when she and white clergyman Claude Williams went to Earle, Arkansas, to investigate the disappearance of black union member Frank Weems. This highly publicized attack on a white woman was seen as a violation of southern "chivalry" and contributed to both media sympathy and federal government support for the plight of sharecroppers and tenant farmers during the Great Depression. Unfortunately, historical scholarship about the flogging has reflected a rather sexist disdain for Blagden, who went on to join the Communist Party, among the STFU's predominately white, male, Socialist leadership. Other victims of antiunion violence including Jim Reese and Eliza Nolden deserve to be remembered as well. The chapter concludes with Jonathan Daniels's conversation with STFU attorney C. T. Carpenter, whom he admired as a patrician who fought for social justice.