Cultural anthropologist Ruth Landes wrote an essay in 1945 entitled “A Northerner Views the South,” which was at once a critique of the region and an honest assessment of how Dixie was perceived by nonsoutherners. “Of all the United States,” she wrote, “the South is most trapped by poverty and disease, illiteracy, political corruption, and deep want of ambition.” The Columbia-educated Landes, who was one of Gunnar Myrdal’s research assistants for An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, condemned white southerners for their false sense of loyalty to “their negroes” and yet was clearly frustrated with how (her criticisms aside) northerners seemed to have an “ineradicable feeling of appreciation for the South.” Much of that feeling was not based on reality but on the way the region was presented in popular culture. Films, best-selling books, advertising, radio, and even popular music offered the American public what Landes described as “beguiling picturizations of the antebellum South as some country [where] men were chivalrous and ladies glamorous, and their former slaves were attached to them by silken bonds.” The region, she noted, was “gilded in sentimentality” to such an extent that northerners did not really know the American South at all.1
Although Landes’s focus was on northern perceptions of Dixie, the truth was that most Americans during the first half of the twentieth century saw the South and southerners through this same magnolia-shaped lens. White southerners, to be sure, believed in the regional myths they associated with the Lost Cause; this belief permeated their culture. Not so in the North, in the Midwest, or even on the West Coast. So how did nonsoutherners come to accept and subscribe to these same myths? The answers lay in historical developments of the late nineteenth century, which included a post–Civil War culture of reconciliation between the North and the South, rapid industrialization and urbanization, anxiety about modernity, the rise of mass consumerism, and the emergence of mass culture.
Sectional reconciliation following the Civil War was by no means limited to reunions of veterans, nor was it simply a matter of politics. The process of reconciliation was also broadly evident in American culture. Novels that centered on the marriage of a northern man and a southern woman—the literary equivalent of reunification—were popular in the late nineteenth century. Songs of reconciliation, from T. Brigham Bishop’s “A Knot of Blue and Gray” (1876) to George M. Cohan’s “Wedding of the Blue and the Gray” (1906), were played in the parlors of American homes. White supremacy was central to the culture of reconciliation, too, because northern and southern whites shared similar views on African Americans. In truth, northern whites sympathized with the South regarding the “Negro,” not only because of the migration of southern blacks to their cities but because they held similar attitudes toward immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who also made their homes there. The enormous success of Thomas Dixon’s racist novels of Reconstruction, for example, was made possible by this shared belief in white racial superiority. The fact was, all across America, white readers regarded Dixon’s not-so-subtle commentary on southern blacks as historical truth.2
The culture of reconciliation could also be found in post–Civil War tourism. As one Union veteran asserted in 1877, tourism to the South was “the surest method of reconciliation” because it allowed for the “intermingling of the people” from both sections.3 Chapters of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) organized trips to the South as early as 1881, well before there were veterans’ reunions. Not only did these veterans visit southern battlefields; they also became participants in the postwar southern tourist trade by visiting historic sites and returning home with souvenirs. In 1899, for example, the Grand Army Club of Massachusetts organized a steamboat tour to Virginia. In addition to visiting battlefields on which they had fought, the group also toured the Confederate Museum (now the White House of the Confederacy), as well as St. John’s Church and the Old Capitol in Richmond.4
Toward the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Civil War monuments served as both the art and tangible sites of reconciliation. The Confederate monument in Arlington National Cemetery, for example, was heralded by its sculptor, Moses Ezekiel, as a monument of reconciliation, and the speeches given at its unveiling in 1914 stressed those same themes. President Woodrow Wilson was on hand to receive the monument as a “gift to the nation” from the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), and his speech focused on its meaning for a reunified country. The rituals of monument unveilings like the one at Arlington were calculated to reflect a spirit of reunification. Government officials from both sections, Union and Confederate veterans, and women from the UDC as well as the Daughters of the American Revolution were all in attendance.5
Reconciliation was also an important plot line in stories developed for the new medium of film, most notably D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). In Griffith’s take on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman, sectional reconciliation was depicted through the marriage of a northern woman to a southern man. While Elsie Stoneman and Ben Cameron’s marriage was used to symbolize reconciliation, Griffith also employed the theme of Anglo-Saxon brotherhood, which brought together white people in the cause of destroying a common enemy—black southerners. Such themes of reconciliation continued to be portrayed on film throughout the twentieth century and played an important role in the culture of reconciliation through World War II.6
The response to modernization in the urban-industrial centers of the North also contributed to perceptions of the South from outside of the region. Rapid industrialization and urbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created social as well as economic conditions that led to Americans’ anxiety about modernity, and in the mediums of popular culture the South was frequently represented as its antithesis. The reactions to a society that was in flux were often at odds with one another. On the one hand, Americans felt an antipathy toward modernity and longed for a return to America’s pastoral and romantic past, with its emphasis on leisure and individualism. Such a dream seemed elusive in the urban factory settings of the North but still possible in the American South. On the other hand, there were the benefits of modernity, which made possible a world where the new technologies employed by industry produced and distributed cheaper consumer goods accessible to people from all walks of life. The conflict between “backward-looking pastoralism” and the impulse toward modernity seemed incompatible; however, popular culture helped to bring both ideas together in the marketplace, and frequently the antebellum South acted as the conduit. That is to say that pastoral images and themes of the Old South and of southerners were used to sell goods and entertainment to American consumers, all of which was made possible by the modern urban-industrial world in which they lived. This was not lost on the producers of popular culture. They were keenly aware of consumers’ anxiety about modernization, and they cleverly linked their products—from pancake flour to movies—to the idyllic images conjured up by the Old South.7
Contemporary writers, too, wrote explicitly about the South as the repository of America’s rural values. In 1896, the northern travel writer Julian Ralph published a book about his visit to the South entitled Dixie; or Southern Scenes and Sketches, which first appeared as a series of articles in Harper’s Weekly. Ralph, who also reported for the New York Sun, traveled south via steamboat down the Mississippi River. He wrote fondly about his adventure as an escape from the frenetic North, pronouncing the South to be a place where he could “cast [his] lines off from the general world of today to float back into a past era, there to loaf away a week of utter rest, undisturbed by telegraph or telephone, a hotel elevator or a clanging cable-car, surrounded by comfort, fed from a good and generous kitchen, and at liberty to forget the rush and bustle of that raging monster the French call the fin de siecle.”8 His observations captured the mood of many Americans concerning the intrusion of modernity into their lives. And it was in the South, the least modernized region of the country, where he and others found comfort.
Historians, too, have written about the impact of modernity on American society. Robert Wiebe, in his now-classic work The Search for Order, described America at the turn of the twentieth century as a “distended society” in which people felt “dislocation” and “bewilderment.”9 The literature of the day often idealized the past and the loss of virtues associated with that past, whether it was “the valiant men of the Wild West, the touching warmth between master and slave, or the quiet peace of the New England village.” In the midst of rapid industrialization and urbanization, especially in the North and the Midwest, Americans were obsessed with what Wiebe described as the “peculiar ethical value of an agricultural life,” which Americans had “long taken for granted.”10
T. J. Jackson Lears, likewise, sought to understand this end-of-the-century anxiety in his book No Place of Grace, about antimodernism and the transformation of American culture.11 What Wiebe described as feelings of “dislocation” Lears called “feelings of unreality.” The response to these feelings, Lears argued, was that people “yearn[ed] for an authentic experience,” whether it was physical, spiritual, or emotional. Although the language Lears used differed from that of Wiebe, they both recognized that a key component to understanding the rapid social and economic changes occurring at the turn of the twentieth century was the inherent contradiction between wanting the benefits of modernity while at the same time longing for the pastoral ideal.12
The rise of mass consumerism, in particular, highlights the ambivalent relationship American society had with modernization, and popular culture provides insights into how the benefits of industrialization, such as mass-produced consumer goods, could be sold and still appeal to people’s need to connect with a simpler, preindustrial past. As Americans became consumers on a mass scale, they also consumed ideas about the products they purchased. When those products were marketed using southern imagery very often it was the South of the American imagination. Advertising, movies, early radio, popular literature, and even music all worked in tandem to shape national perceptions of the South. It was represented as a region that upheld its links to the rural past and the one least spoiled by urbanization and industrialization. The irony was that this narrative of southern identity was being disseminated for consumption by industries from outside of the South, whether they were New York advertising agencies, radio shows broadcast from Chicago, or Hollywood films. This is not to say that white southerners did not see themselves as preservers of the “southern way of life” or contribute to this perception. Rather, the industries responsible for the spread of popular culture nationally were located outside of Dixie and had far more influence over what ideas Americans consumed about the South than did native southerners themselves.
The South in popular culture is a subject that historians have, for the most part, avoided, as not serious enough to warrant their attention. To be sure, Jack Temple Kirby addressed it in Media-Made Dixie more than thirty years ago by surveying images of the South, especially those developed by native southerners like D. W. Griffith and Thomas Nelson Page. The book, however, provided a somewhat cursory overview of the South in popular culture, and contemporary reviewers regarded it as more anecdotal than scholarly.13 The subjects of popular culture, however, deserve to be taken seriously and certainly merit more in-depth attention by southern historians. This is not to say that there have not been important historical contributions to the study of popular culture, only that the South in popular culture represents one of the least-investigated areas of study, especially for historians of southern identity. By examining the various topics of popular culture—from advertising to films—historians can further their understanding of the South in a national, and even global, context.14
Southern historians who do write about the South and popular culture often turn to the work of sociologists, particularly John Shelton Reed, who has examined southern culture for more than thirty years. As early as 1972, Reed was grappling with the issues of regionalism and national identity. In The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society, he wrote about the effects of American mass culture on the South, especially of the national media. The South, he argued, may have been engaged with the national media, but the national media was “subservient to community values” that existed within the region. Moreover, he argued, even though the South was not (at least in 1972) creating mass culture through the popular media, the region did use such media to perpetuate and maintain regional and local cultural values. Reed’s overarching conclusion—that, on the whole, southerners did not create mass culture—is important and has a basis in fact. That is to say, the South did not—and, as a rule, does not—manufacture mass culture. Publishing houses, television and film studios, and advertising firms are headquartered in New York or Los Angeles and have long been responsible for the way in which nonsoutherners perceive the region.15
Scholars in other fields, from literature to film studies, have addressed the role of the South in popular culture through the lens of their various disciplines. The most recent of these include Leigh Anne Duck’s The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism; Tara McPherson’s Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South; and Allison Graham’s Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle. Duck explores how the literary modernism of southern writers, from Thomas Dixon to Erskine Caldwell, helped shape national perceptions of the South. McPherson, a professor of cinema studies, employs feminist theory to explore what she terms the “nostalgia industry,” which has constructed an “imagined South” in the period from the 1930s to the present. Graham’s work on film and television is much more focused on the period of civil rights, but she also argues that national perceptions of the region can be linked to the media’s interpretations of race, class, and gender in the South.16
This book represents an effort to take popular culture seriously as a topic of historical investigation and to understand its implications for the region in a national context. Through a study of the South in popular culture in the period from the late nineteenth century through World War II, the book analyzes how perceptions of southern identity have been shaped from outside of the region. In chapters on advertising, popular music, early radio, travel literature, and the movies, it examines how popular culture has influenced and colored how Americans viewed the region and its people. This study also examines the southern tourist trade to show how the South responded to national perceptions of the region. Southern state and local governments, as well as individual entrepreneurs, not only understood the region’s identity in the national imagination but sought to capitalize on it by providing nonsouthern tourists, especially those from the North and the Midwest, with exactly what they had come to expect of the South, whether it was being able to see blacks working in cotton fields, taking tours of old plantations, or experiencing that ubiquitous feature of life in Dixie known as southern hospitality.
National perceptions of the South were, undeniably, often oversimplified. During the period of this study, the South was frequently portrayed in popular culture as a region that was either primitive or exotic and was seen through the haze of moonlight and magnolias. Southern identity in the national imagination encompassed many regional icons, including the old Confederate colonel, the mammy, the belle, the opulent plantation big house, bolls of cotton, and the hillbilly. Such representations of the region became part of the catalog of southern imagery that was employed in everything from advertising to movies. In popular culture, the South was used to represent the pastoral ideal and to recall a premodern America. These themes were not isolated in any one area of popular culture; they were evident in all of them. Thus, the southern mammy was more than an advertising icon. She appeared in popular music, on early radio shows, in Hollywood movies, and in popular literature. This was also true of the antebellum plantation, which served as the locale for novels, advertisements, and films about the South throughout the period of this study, which concludes in the years immediately following World War II.
Such perceptions not only perpetuated ideas of a romantic, premodern South. They also helped sustain beliefs about race that were particularly detrimental to African Americans nationally. White Americans, on the whole, subscribed to the mythology that blacks were happy in servitude and needed white supervision or were exotic creatures who provided entertainment. Overcoming these southern racial stereotypes found in popular culture proved to be a difficult task and hurt the cause of civil rights nationally. As Claude Barnett, a leading black journalist of the period, argued, such characterizations also damaged black morale and symbolized how the nation had capitulated to the South.17
Fugitive poet John Crowe Ransom observed in 1930: “It is out of fashion these days to look backward rather than forward. About the only American given to it is some unreconstructed Southerner.” Ransom, of course, was concerned about the preservation of the “southern way of life” and was emphasizing the desirable qualities of the region’s agrarian tradition. Clearly, he had not fully examined representations of the South in popular culture, for had he done so he would have recognized that the mediums of national culture not only looked backward but used the South to do so. Several years later, Ransom’s fellow southerner David Cohn wrote a book about the region in which he lamented how difficult it was to “[make] others see the South plain.” Cohn, a native of Greenville, Mississippi, observed that the antebellum traditions of the South and its image in the national imagination remained intact despite the work of historians and sociologists to demystify Dixie. In the “minds of outsiders,” the South was imbued with qualities that applied to no other region of the country, causing Cohn to conclude, “Men love what they imagine and worship what they create.” The South of the American imagination was, and still is, very often created by the industries of popular media. During the period marked by the rise of mass consumption, those industries produced an image of the South that contributed to perceptions of the region as the custodian of America’s pastoral traditions. It was portrayed as a place where those traditions still had meaning, and where Americans, if they ventured South, might get to experience the Dixie of their dreams.18