CHAPTER SEVEN
Reliance
Nobody wants Mississippi to become a beggar at the government’s back door but other states are being helped by the federal relief commission and there is no reason why this state should not be included in the project.
—Hattiesburg American, November 1, 1932
In October of 1932, white Hattiesburg leaders held an epic Golden Jubilee Festival to celebrate the city’s fiftieth anniversary. For six consecutive days, thousands of locals braved unseasonably cold and rainy weather to attend a series of commemorative events. On Monday, city representatives initiated the festivities with a ceremonial lighting of the “jubilee light” and opening of a temporary “Golden Jubilee Museum.” On Tuesday, members of the Rotary Club reviewed highlights of Hattiesburg history at a special luncheon. That Wednesday, the Exchange Club offered a similar recital, and the Hattiesburg American published a special twenty-eight-page “Golden Jubilee Edition.” Thursday was “Hattiesburg Day” in all local white schools. Students received historical programs during their chapel periods and attended afternoon pep rallies. Later that night, local merchants sponsored a fashion show and an outdoor concert. The next day, the State Teachers College marching band led a parade from downtown to the college, where Mississippi governor Martin S. Conner (a Hattiesburg native) dedicated the school’s new athletic field. That evening, the governor and his wife attended an elegant party and dance at the Forrest Hotel. The following morning, they were among over four thousand spectators who watched the State Teachers College football team defeat Spring Hill College twelve to zero.1
The Hattiesburg American brimmed with optimism, suggesting throughout the week that lessons from the city’s past should inspire confidence in its future. Wednesday’s commemorative edition was filled with articles highlighting proud moments in the city’s history—Captain Hardy’s lunch break in the forest, the completion of various railroads and sawmills, the construction of new churches and schools, and the contributions of organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce. This past glory, the paper insisted, not only offered a blueprint for future prosperity but practically assured it. “Hattiesburg, striding city of the past, well founded by the pioneers who settled this part of Mississippi looks forward confidently to an era of future expansion and development which will outdistance all achievements of the past,” one reporter wrote.2
Despite the optimism, Hattiesburg in the fall of 1932 was in very poor shape. That year, Mississippi produced its lowest timber yield since 1889. From a high of approximately forty thousand workers in the mid-1920s, Mississippi sawmills by 1932 employed less than thirteen thousand men. Most of Hattiesburg’s lumber wholesale offices had closed, and all the local sawmills had begun laying off workers. J. J. Newman was in its eighth year of layoffs and on the verge of closing for good. Tatum Lumber, the city’s second largest sawmill, had by then also started laying off workers; it too had only a few years left. Hundreds of sawmills across the region had already ceased operations. Over the previous six years, at least 450 sawmills had cut out of the Piney Woods, leaving behind a “scenery of stumps, [and] ‘ghost’ lumber towns,” observed one local. The people of the Piney Woods were heartbroken. “Where once saws hummed a ceaseless song along hundreds of miles of railroads traversing South Mississippi,” a local writer noted, “today the mills still in operation are few and far between.” That autumn, even the relentlessly optimistic Hattiesburg American finally admitted, “The forests are dead as an industry; almost gone as a possible source of income and revenue.”3
The decline of the timber trade represented only one component of a broader statewide economic collapse. Agriculture, still the state’s most valuable industry and largest employer, experienced a similarly rapid decline. Several factors—including unprecedented international competition, overproduction in the American South, and the emergence of synthetic fibers such as rayon—combined to drive down cotton prices throughout the late 1920s. Between 1923 and 1931, the price of cotton plummeted from a high of 31¢ per pound to a low of just 6¢. In 1920, Mississippi farms were worth nearly $790 million. A decade later, they were valued at less than $570 million. Of course, all of this occurred amid a disastrous global economic collapse.4
By the fall of 1932, Mississippi was mired in its worst financial crisis since the end of the Civil War. With farmers struggling and sawmills closing, state tax revenues were dramatically slashed, dragging an already poor state even deeper into poverty. Between 1928 and 1932, Mississippi’s assessments declined by more than $80 million and the state’s debt spiraled to over $50 million (the city of Hattiesburg itself had outstanding bonds totaling over $2.3 million). Financial destitution could be seen across Mississippi. People defaulted on their taxes. Retailers closed shops. Manufacturing firms ceased production. There were some wealthy planters and merchants who continued to do well, but most working-class Mississippians, both white and black, suffered tremendously. The state had been very poor since the Civil War, but the economic recession of the 1920s and 1930s charted an unprecedented path of almost unthinkable destitution. Between 1929 and 1933, the state’s per capita annual income dropped from $285 to $131.5
In the Mississippi Piney Woods, thousands of people were desperate for work. During the week of Hattiesburg’s Golden Jubilee Festival, an advertisement for part-time temporary highway jobs drew an estimated fifteen hundred applicants from Forrest County alone. At the time, only about fifteen thousand males lived in Forrest County, which suggests that roughly one out of every ten males in the county applied for those jobs. And that does not even factor in young, elderly, or disabled males, or those who simply took one look at the applicant line and walked away. In the coming years, every such advertised position drew large crowds of applicants, including hundreds of migrants who poured into Hattiesburg from the dying sawmill towns of southeastern Mississippi.6
Competition for work could be fierce. Some traditionally black jobs—especially on the railroads—became so desirable that whites were willing to kill for them. The early 1930s saw the outbreak of a racially based shooting spree in southern Mississippi over positions such as brakeman and fireman. During the summer and fall of 1931, four black brakemen and firemen were shot on the job. One particularly unfortunate man named Frank Kincaid survived a shooting that August only to be killed in November. Black railroad workers Turner Sims and Aaron Williams were shot a month later. By the autumn of 1932, the Hattiesburg American counted fifteen black Mississippi firemen and brakemen who had been wounded or killed by gunfire during the previous year.7
There were some jobs in Hattiesburg. Throughout much of the 1930s, the Hercules Powder Company and Tatum Lumber each employed up to four hundred people at a time. Additionally, a few dozen smaller companies combined to offer several hundred more jobs. Most of these positions, however, were fairly unstable. Employees could never be certain how many hours would be available or how long the jobs would last. Thousands of local jobholders worked only part time, experienced roving layoffs, or earned too little to fully provide for their families. In 1933, workers at Tatum Lumber earned only 15¢ per hour over ten-hour workdays. Even people with jobs still scrambled to earn extra wages however they could.8
These laborers resembled what contemporary scholars would label a “precariat”—a “precarious proletariat” made up of blue-collar workers who moved between a variety of temporary jobs to earn a living. Some people worked part time for a number of firms at once. Others performed farm work for daily pay. Hundreds more hopped on railroad cars or hitchhiked in search of out-of-town jobs. Local youths delivered boxes of groceries and newspapers to help their parents. Families raised chickens and pigs and grew their own vegetables. People sold sweet potatoes, pecans, and homemade quilts by the roadside. Some traded produce or performed odd jobs in exchange for services. Many local lawyers and doctors were forced to accept payment in goods such as milk or corn in lieu of cash. The people of Hattiesburg scraped and saved to survive an era of instability and uncertainty. The only clear truth was that the Hub City needed more jobs.9
Between 1929 and 1932, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce exhausted virtually every imaginable possibility in its search for new industries. Their far-reaching efforts included proposals to secure a fish hatchery, a disabled soldiers home, a garment factory, a tire and tube factory, a denim factory, a canning plant, a fireplace heater factory, a battery plant, a hospital, a cattle farm, a vocational school, and a furniture factory. On several occasions, J. J. Newman Lumber Company president Fenwick Peck mentioned the possibility of establishing a paper plant, but neither this nor any of the aforementioned proposals ever came to fruition. A new downtown library built through a combination of municipal bonds, individual donations, and corporate sponsorships and a new movie theater built by the Saenger Theatre Company of New Orleans provided several dozen temporary jobs and enhanced local public life, but the Chamber of Commerce in 1932 had not yet been able to attract any significant new employers. “Results have been disappointing,” admitted T. S. Jackson in a 1931 memo.10
T. S. Jackson himself was not doing very well. His health was failing, and as he lost his capacity to work, his income was rapidly diminishing. By the close of the 1920s, his primary source of income was the salary he received as secretary of the Chamber of Commerce. But even this job soon exceeded his capabilities. In 1930, illness kept him from several meetings; by the autumn of 1932, he had been forced to resign. Jackson’s colleagues were worried. At one Chamber of Commerce meeting that fall, a close friend noted that Jackson was “ill in bed, and in need of the money.” Thomas Smiley Jackson held on for another fifteen months before dying peacefully in his sleep on January 8, 1934. “Few if any citizens believed as strongly, or asserted their faith as emphatically in this community as did Mr. Jackson,” the Hattiesburg American memorialized.11
Jackson’s contemporaries W. S. F. Tatum and Louis Faulkner were doing much better. Tatum’s sawmill was on the verge of cutting out, but the wealth he had built in previous decades sustained him and several generations of his family throughout the Great Depression. He and many of the city’s leading white men tried to help the poor by giving generously to charities. Tatum was never known for treating his sawmill employees very well, but throughout his life, he gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to organizations such as the Main Street Methodist Church, the Hattiesburg YMCA, Mississippi Women’s College, and Millsaps College; he even gave a large donation toward construction of a church in Santiago, Cuba. “He holds his wealth in trust for the less fortunate of his fellows,” one contemporary noted of Tatum, “and his life has been filled with good deeds.”12
Louis Faulkner, who weathered the recession through his position with the Mississippi Central Railroad and a variety of small investments, also poured much of his energy into helping less fortunate citizens. He sent checks to the Red Cross, the Bible Society, the Salvation Army, the American Legion, Palmer Orphanage, Hattiesburg High School, Mississippi Normal College, Mississippi Women’s College, Hattiesburg Boys Brotherhood, Mississippi Children’s Home Society, the YMCA, and the Lion’s Club Doll and Toy Fund. Faulkner was also heavily involved in the local Boy Scout troop and the First Presbyterian Church, and he played an instrumental role in building the new football field at the State Teachers College, which bore the name Faulkner Field in his honor.13
Despite some examples of interracial cooperation in the 1920s, most Hattiesburg charity drives were strictly segregated by race. The Hattiesburg American’s inventive 1932 “Church and Charity” campaign, for example, which bolstered downtown commerce by donating advertising revenues to church charities, was open “to every white church or organization.” No black congregations or businesses could apply. In fact, there is very little evidence of cooperation between white and black churches, even those of the same religious denomination. And the charitable programs of organizations such as the local YMCA and the Boy Scouts were generally open only to white citizens. Personal donations also reflected this trend. Although Louis Faulkner donated money to help the all-white Prentiss High School purchase new marching band uniforms, for example, he did not respond to a request from the all-black Prentiss Normal Institute for help rebuilding its grist mill. The black students might not get enough to eat, but those white kids sure would look sharp in their new uniforms.14
In 1931, this commitment to segregated charity created a controversy that drew national attention to Hattiesburg. In January of that year, the local branch of the Red Cross received a grant from the national organization to distribute goods to poor families “without food, clothing, and fuel,” explained the chapter’s chairman. “No hungry person will go unfed,” promised the organization’s Mississippi field representative, “no family needing food, clothing, medical supplies or fuel will go unattended in Forrest County.” Operating out of an office in City Hall, the Red Cross campaign started well. In the first month, the organization received over twenty-five hundred applications for assistance and provided food vouchers and clothing to approximately five hundred families. For a few weeks, the effort looked promising. But then the Red Cross encountered a series of challenges.15
The first challenge was that some families applying for relief did not actually live in Forrest County. The second was that some applicants were fraudulently exaggerating their poverty or the size of their families to receive additional food vouchers. Although impossible to completely eliminate dishonest requests, local residents helped out by verifying the residences and economic conditions of the families. The third problem—the one that threatened to completely undermine all local Red Cross efforts—was that some of the families applying for relief were black.16
Poor Hattiesburg whites, themselves in desperate need of charity, were appalled by the idea of having to wait in the same lines and be served at the same counters as African Americans. Some even threatened violence, promising to beat up needy black applicants who came to City Hall for help. The objections did not come only from the poor. Middle- and upper-class white women—presumably members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy who met in City Hall—also issued complaints about the presence of poor black men and women in the building. “The droves of negro applicants to the Red Cross … was embarrassing to ladies who visited the City Hall on business and otherwise,” explained a statement from the mayor’s office.17
White Hattiesburgers wanted the Red Cross to adhere to the racial regulations of their society, but the national Red Cross had a nondiscrimination policy and refused to segregate its charity. As the field worker Margaret Butler-Bishop explained to the Hattiesburg American in 1931, the Red Cross “knows no race, creed or color lines: hunger and suffering are universal and the organization’s policy is to deal with all needy alike.”18
Mayor W. S. F. Tatum decided to offer the Red Cross an ultimatum: either quit serving African Americans or vacate City Hall. When the organization once again refused to discriminate, Tatum ordered the eviction of the Red Cross from its City Hall offices. On the afternoon of Thursday, February 12, his workmen moved the organization’s supplies and office furniture to a public sidewalk, where it sat outdoors for several hours before the manager of the new Saenger Theatre provided access to some extra storage space. A notice explaining the eviction read, “No nigger should be fed while a single white man, woman or child is hungry.”19
Even as their society crumbled around them, white Hattiesburgers held tight to their society’s racial order as if it were the last remaining promise of the New South. In destitution or in wealth, Jim Crow ensured racial superiority for even the most deprived whites. As the Philadelphia Tribune observed of the incident, “Even the gnawing pains of hunger are unable to make the white people of that God-for-saken section forget their white supremacy.”20
The Red Cross eviction was indicative of how white Hattiesburgers tried to maintain a sense of normalcy during the economic crisis. In a society filled with job loss, poverty, and uncertainty, local white residents embraced longtime traditions to help manufacture optimism through the preservation of their way of life. Not only did they continue following the customs of racial segregation, they also went to church, sent their kids to school, celebrated holidays, and attended community events such as garden club meetings, dances, football games, and the 1932 Golden Jubilee Festival. “Cares will be forgotten,” the Hattiesburg American ensured readers of the commemoration, “as all contemplate the gift of years and envisage the possibilities of the future.”21
The optimism surrounding the Golden Jubilee Festival was not entirely unfounded. Just two months before, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce had been contacted by the Fantus Factory Locating Service of Chicago. Fantus was scouting potential new factory sites for a Chicago-based company, Reliance Manufacturing. In operation for over twenty years, Reliance Manufacturing was a well-established company with a national reputation. Its “Big Yank” work shirts were sold in hundreds of J. C. Penney stores. This possibility represented a major opportunity. A Chamber of Commerce committee estimated that a new Reliance factory could bring approximately five hundred jobs and an annual payroll of over $250,000 to Hattiesburg.22
Two months after the initial contact, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce invited Reliance officials to visit the Hub City during the Golden Jubilee Festival. This was, of course, no coincidence. In fact, it is likely that the festival would have looked very different if not for the out-of-town guests. Perhaps it might not have occurred at all. In any case, the Chamber of Commerce members did everything they could to impress the visiting Chicagoans. They nicknamed that Wednesday “Reliance Day” and placed a two-page advertisement in the Hattiesburg American’s “Golden Jubilee Edition” welcoming the Chicago businessmen to the Hub City. “Today is your day,” the advertisement told the Northerners. “The city is yours!”23
In addition to an original Reliance Committee (one of the few committees ever chaired by Mayor Tatum), the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce formed three additional committees just to oversee the visit. Louis Faulkner chaired the Reliance Welcoming Committee, and two smaller committees organized a luncheon and dinner. Reliance officials were feted with an official welcoming ceremony, a tour of the city, meetings with white civic leaders, and several small ceremonies. On the evening of “Reliance Day,” 175 local white businessmen paid 50¢ each to attend a banquet at the Hotel Hattiesburg in honor of their Chicago guests. Louis Faulkner served as toastmaster.24
All local citizens were asked to participate in the courtship of Reliance. Several newspaper articles provided details about the visit, and an editorial in the Hattiesburg American urged residents to “clean-up of premises, both private and public.” “Unsightly debris and trash, fallen fences and decaying refuse ought to be hauled away and dumped out of sight,” the editorial instructed. Any locals who encountered the visiting Chicagoans were encouraged to act friendly and upbeat. Coffee was to be poured with extra care and soda served with a cheerful smile. Homeowners were directed to fly flags and place welcome signs. And everyone was advised to lift their chin and walk with a sense of pride. “Some folks will be embarrassed by the vacant store buildings in the business district,” the American acknowledged, but “every town has vacant store buildings and Hattiesburg probably has fewer of them than any city its size in the South.”25
Like the visiting Tuf-Nut officials from a few years before, Reliance Manufacturing Company representatives understood that Hattiesburg was desperate for jobs and negotiated from a position of strength. The Chicago-based firm made several requests, including multiyear tax exemptions, an annual subsidy, and the construction of a new factory building that Reliance could lease rent free for twenty years. The building was the most burdensome requirement. To complete such a facility, the city needed to raise at least $75,000.26
Debate ensued within the Chamber of Commerce, but it does not appear that the group ever seriously considered rejecting Reliance. With outstanding municipal bonds totaling more than $2.3 million, the city was in no position to underwrite the building, but several prominent local businessmen quickly vowed to cover construction costs. Mayor Tatum offered to loan the Chamber of Commerce $30,000, and several other white businessmen, including Louis Faulkner, collectively contributed $25,000. The rest of the building was financed by smaller investments, local bonds, and a mortgage with the First National Bank of Hattiesburg whose president was a member of the Chamber of Commerce. An additional noteworthy benefit of constructing a factory was that all the work was contracted to local companies, including some owned by members of the Chamber of Commerce. Financing the building also presented intriguing investment opportunities. In the final deal, each major investor agreed to exchange their share of the building for equivalent shares of stock in Reliance Manufacturing.27
After several months of negotiations and visits, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce in April of 1933 sent representatives to Chicago to sign the contract with Reliance. The organization had finally realized its longtime dream of bringing a major new employer to Hattiesburg. For weeks, news of the deal dominated the front pages of the Hattiesburg American. No one thought the factory alone could save Hattiesburg, but it did promise hundreds of jobs that would help many local families. When the factory opened that October, thousands of people, including both of Mississippi’s United States senators, attended the dedication ceremony in downtown Hattiesburg. “This building,” a Chamber of Commerce representative told the audience, “is an expression of your humanity.” Only white people were allowed to work there.28
The other great source of optimism during the autumn of 1932 was the upcoming presidential election. White Hattiesburgers were eager to cast their votes for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the charismatic Democratic governor of New York, and they hoped the rest of the country would join them in doing so. Mississippi was solidly Democrat and had been ever since the Revolution of 1875, when the Republican carpetbaggers were removed from power. The party of Lincoln would not carry the Magnolia State; there was no drama there. But since 1892, the national Democratic Party had nominated just one successful presidential candidate, and even that victory had been something of a fluke. Virginia Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the 1912 election only because former president Teddy Roosevelt had split the Republican vote with his progressive “Bull Moose Party.” Wilson was barely reelected in 1916 (he would have lost if just 3,800 more Californians had voted Republican), and Republican candidates had taken each presidential election since 1920.29
By the autumn of 1932, however, nearly every corner of the United States had been pulled into the depths of the Great Depression, and many Americans were ready to remove Republican president Herbert Hoover. Although widely recognized as a great humanitarian before his presidency, Hoover seemed oblivious to the realities facing American families during the depression. He rejected most proposals for direct assistance to the unemployed and was continuously vilified for his inability—even outright refusal—to offer more aid to America’s poor. The public demonized him for his lack of action, dubbing their ramshackle shantytowns “Hoovervilles” and calling the sheets of newsprint that they used for warmth “Hoover Blankets.”30
Hoover’s popularity plummeted further in the summer of 1932, when a group of World War I veterans known as the Bonus Army was violently evicted from their makeshift camp in Washington, DC, where they had gathered to demand early payment of their service bonuses. Images of American troops scuffling with World War I veterans appeared in newspapers across the country, drawing the ire of an already aggravated populace. The fiasco was not entirely Hoover’s fault. The military officials who performed the eviction were largely responsible for the ugly result, and many Americans—including Franklin Roosevelt—did not support the veterans’ demands (which included a petition signed by 513 veterans from Forrest County, Mississippi). But as with the depression itself, widespread national sentiment concluded that Hoover should have handled the situation with greater tact. “If Governor Roosevelt had been president,” insisted the Hattiesburg American, “U.S. troops never would have been called out against the Bonus Expeditionary Force. Hoover is going to get the royal boot of the veterans and other thousands of voters who side with them on the basic issue.”31
Like many Americans, most white Hattiesburg voters wanted the federal government to undertake more direct actions to help mitigate the effects of the recession. White Hattiesburgers were a proud people who believed that their society had been built by innovative visionaries who used ingenuity and grit to construct a modern society from the devastation of the Civil War. But these hardworking people also believed themselves to have been victimized by timber mismanagement and other economic factors beyond their control. The white working-class people of Hattiesburg did not want handouts; they just needed jobs. And Roosevelt’s “New Deal” promised to use the resources of the federal government to help put them back to work. On November 8, 1932, over 91 percent of Hattiesburg voters cast their ballots for Franklin Roosevelt.32
Roosevelt and his New Deal captured Hattiesburg’s attention. When Roosevelt took to the airwaves that spring with his “fireside chats” that explained his new policies, white Hattiesburgers gathered in groups around radios to hear his plans to save America’s economy. “When Roosevelt was making his famous fireside chats,” remembered local white resident Buck Wells, “then you couldn’t find a soul that had a radio that his whole family wasn’t wrapped up in it.”33
In Hattiesburg, the meaning of the New Deal extended beyond economics or politics. The ambitious programs became a part of residents’ culture and society, offering to many an essential foundation for hope. “That’s what the people needed,” Wells explained. “They needed a leader that could tell them to hang in there that help was coming.” Locals followed New Deal programs religiously. The Hattiesburg American began running a daily syndicated column titled “New Deal Doings” and carried various news of the New Deal in every single issue for over seven years.34
The anti-statism that characterized Southern political thought in other historical moments was not widely espoused in the 1930s. In reality, such sentiments were only consistently employed in response to issues related to race. The New Deal included several anti-discrimination measures, but it nevertheless functioned quite well within the racial hierarchy of the Jim Crow South. White Southern legislators and civic officials controlled the distribution of New Deal benefits, enabling them to discriminate by steering jobs and funding projects to disproportionately benefit white residents. White Hattiesburgers enthusiastically welcomed massive government expansion and federal influence into their lives. When it came to the New Deal, there was little talk of “states’ rights” in southern Mississippi.35
One of the first New Deal programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), seemed tailor-made for the Piney Woods. The CCC was designed to remedy both unemployment and decades of environmental abuse by providing federally funded conservation jobs to young men to improve parks, plant trees, build rural roads, and protect the forest from fires, insects, and disease. This environmental relief program quickly became one of the most popular and successful New Deal initiatives, employing approximately 2.5 million Americans in nine years and planting an estimated 570 million trees.36
The CCC was enormously popular in Hattiesburg. “We had a jillion of them in this area,” recalled one local man of the CCC workers. Throughout the 1930s, the Hattiesburg American printed dozens of stories detailing the organization’s activities and advertising CCC jobs. “Pine tree seedlings today are basking in the balmy spring sunshine, stretching their leafy little arms skyward—and growing in terms of dollars and cents daily,” the American noted. Interested locals could even visit CCC camps during intermittent open houses.37
Mississippi’s thirty-four CCC camps employed white men almost exclusively. Despite African Americans’ historical predominance in the Mississippi lumber industry, black workers comprised only 1.7 percent of Mississippi’s CCC workers. If not for an antidiscrimination clause in the original CCC bill, there very well might have been none.38
Another New Deal program, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), also benefitted many local white residents. The NRA was designed to support good domestic manufacturing jobs by endorsing companies that paid minimum wages and offered reasonable hours for their employees. The endorsement was typically made by the inclusion of a special NRA blue eagle logo printed on the packaging of NRA-backed goods. Across the country, consumers knew that products stamped with the blue NRA logo were manufactured by hardworking Americans who labored in fair conditions.39
The new Reliance Manufacturing Company was Hattiesburg’s largest NRA shop. Though the Supreme Court eventually ruled the NRA unconstitutional, in two years, the program helped boost Reliance sales across the country. In the first quarter of 1934, the company broke all previous sales records, which benefitted both employees and investors connected to the Hattiesburg shop. Other companies, some of which were not even eligible for NRA membership, included the blue eagle logo in their advertisements. And the Hattiesburg American regularly printed the image in the corner of its front page, even months after the program ended. People in Hattiesburg were excited about the New Deal.40
There were some critics among prominent local white men. Both Louis Faulkner and W. S. F. Tatum were fiscal conservatives who usually identified as Republicans and later levied major criticisms at federal spending and involvement in local affairs. Tatum in particular was critical of the effects of the Social Security Act on his payroll. No one knows how the men voted in the 1932 presidential election, but it is clear that they cast aside whatever reservations they may have held to become very involved in overseeing New Deal spending. Ironically, the New Deal’s most vocal local critics participated heavily in managing improvement projects in Hattiesburg, especially after Roosevelt announced the formation of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).41
Enacted in 1935 as part of Roosevelt’s “Second New Deal,” the WPA was essentially a massive expansion of the CCC. The organization hired millions of unemployed men and women to complete a wide range of construction, maintenance, and art projects that helped beautify America’s landscape and improve the nation’s infrastructure. The scope was colossal. During its existence, the WPA paid nearly $10 billion in wages to over eight million workers who built or repaired over 650,000 miles of roads, nearly 78,000 bridges, over 937,000 traffic signs and 35,000 public buildings, and thousands of swimming pools, airports, golf courses, sidewalks, viaducts, curbs, and gutters. To that date, the WPA was the largest known public works program in the history of human civilization.42
Federal WPA spending was unevenly distributed among states. Politically powerful states such as New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Illinois were among the nation’s leaders in per capita WPA expenditures, while less influential states such as Mississippi ranked near the bottom (Mississippi tied with Alabama for thirty-sixth place). Nonetheless, the federal grants contributed greatly to Mississippi’s economy and infrastructure. During the 1930s, the WPA employed as many as 48,690 Mississippians at one time and provided over $41.5 million in wages while funding thousands of new roads and community initiatives that ranged from park beautification and school lunches to public health programs. Like many white Southerners, Hattiesburg’s civic leaders worked to maximize their access to federal resources and ensure that the windfalls of federal spending disproportionally benefitted whites. The Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce led the charge.43
Just six weeks after President Roosevelt signed the legislation creating the WPA, Louis Faulkner proposed a widely supported motion that the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce “take an active part in getting some of the money which is being appropriated by the Government for certain projects.” This motion marked a pivotal change for the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce. The organization never stopped its pursuit of new industries, but it did shift its focus from recruiting private firms to accessing federal grants. Over the following years, the Chamber of Commerce essentially operated as a local clearinghouse for federal spending, soliciting and distributing WPA funding and other federal resources to local public works projects that provided thousands of jobs and helped improve the city’s infrastructure.44
Depending on the nature of the project, WPA funding proposals were typically submitted to state or federal officials by the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce or the Forrest County Board of Supervisors. After an initial grant of $22,204 (part of a large statewide WPA distribution), they very quickly gained access to greater resources. On November 6, 1935, local officials announced approval of a federal grant totaling $272,306 to support street paving and road repair. That same day, the state’s WPA Women’s Work Division announced funding for several library positions in Hattiesburg. And two weeks later, the city of Hattiesburg received notice of a $30,000 WPA grant to begin construction on a new 3,700-seat athletic gym for Hattiesburg High School. The federal grants delivered new employment opportunities. By the end of 1935, the Hattiesburg American estimated that the WPA and other New Deal programs had created over forty-five hundred jobs in the region. The paper dutifully recognized the importance of the New Deal itself, but it also celebrated the role played by the Chamber of Commerce in accessing those federal dollars. The newspaper’s editor, himself a member of the chamber, called 1935 “one of the most successful years in the history of the civic body.”45
Over the next five years, dozens of WPA-funded projects provided thousands of jobs for local workers, both white and black, and millions of dollars for improvements to the city’s infrastructure. Projects included widening streets, building a new post office, digging new sewer lines, clearing debris from creeks, erecting utility poles, grading a new airport runway, and improving parks and public spaces. As part of the WPA Writer’s Project, a bevy of local scholars and writers were paid to research the city’s history and document its flora and economy. Their notes were collected and deposited in the state archives (where they remain today) and used to help produce a book titled Mississippi: The WPA Guide to the Magnolia State, part of a national WPA series on each state.46
Another major WPA-backed project was the restoration of Camp Shelby. The establishment of Camp Shelby in 1917 had been one of the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce’s greatest early achievements. When the United States entered World War I, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce sent representatives to New York City in an attempt to convince National Guard officials to select Hattiesburg as a site for one of the Guard’s new bases. Competing with dozens of similar groups from across America, the Hattiesburg faction could never secure a meeting. But the organization realized that it held a tremendous advantage. George McHenry, an Ohioan who had moved to Mississippi to start a sawmill along the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad, was an old military buddy of General Leonard Wood (with whom he had served during the Spanish-American War), and he used his personal connection to convince General Wood to visit the Hub City. Upon visiting Hattiesburg and meeting with local citizens, Wood ultimately selected the Hub City as one of the final two sites for National Guard bases. The camp was named in honor of Revolutionary War hero Colonel Isaac Shelby of Kentucky. During World War I, Shelby hosted up to forty thousand troops and employed thirty-five hundred workers at a time, briefly providing an enormous boost to the local economy. But the camp was abandoned shortly after the war, and its land had been reclaimed by the forest.47
Fifty days after President Roosevelt established the WPA, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce formed a “Camp Shelby Committee” to solicit federal grants for the restoration of the old military base. For this effort, they appealed directly to the military. In 1935, the Chamber of Commerce hosted the influential general William L. Grayson, taking him out to visit the camp and hosting him at a lavish banquet at the Hotel Hattiesburg. And in 1937, Louis Faulkner led a small contingent of Chamber of Commerce officials to Atlanta to meet with Army General George Van Horn Moseley, commander of the Fourth Corps Area. Grayson and Moseley each endorsed the reestablishment of Shelby, leading to a number of different grants provided by the WPA and the National Guard to help restore the old military base.48
Between 1935 and 1940, the WPA and National Guard spent an estimated $80,000 per year to pay for labor and supplies to reestablish Camp Shelby as a suitable military base. For reasons unknown, Forrest County officials also used convict laborers at Shelby. Together, the convicts and the WPA workers cleared foliage, regraded roads, and erected utility poles, putting the camp into “spick span shape,” observed a local writer, by the time a small contingent of troops was scheduled to arrive for training in the summer of 1937.49
In February of that same year, the new Hattiesburg High School gym opened to great fanfare with a double-header basketball contest between the boys’ and girls’ teams of Hattiesburg and Purvis High School. The girls lost the opening game 30–15, but the boys prevailed in the nightcap, dispatching Purvis 32–17. A large crowd, “distended with pride,” wrote one reporter, turned out to see the new WPA gymnasium, whose total cost expanded to approximately $50,000. The gym was a great boon to the white community. Over the following years and decades, it hosted countless games, graduations, baccalaureates, assemblies, theatrical performances, and a broad range of other events. City officials even let white people from other nearby communities use the gym for basketball games. Several other smaller WPA grants were used to maintain trees and shrubs on the Hattiesburg High School campus and purchase new paint and blackboards for classrooms, making the all-white school a much nicer place to learn. No black student was ever allowed to attend or use the federally funded gym.50
Throughout the 1930s, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce continuously steered most federal spending toward projects that only benefitted whites. There were several components to this unbalanced distribution. Individually, whites received most of the jobs provided by New Deal programs such as the CCC and WPA. In 1939, white public relief workers in Forrest County outnumbered African Americans five-to-one in a city where African Americans comprised roughly 35 percent of the population. Some black workers did receive public relief jobs, but the concept of “nigger work” existed even in the era of the Great Depression. Black WPA workers were typically relegated to tasks such as ditch digging, sewer clearance, general labor, and spraying pesticide.51
Black women were almost completely excluded from WPA opportunities. Their white female counterparts were generally limited to such positions as librarian, secretary, researcher, or writer, but white women, many of whom were widowed or married to unemployed men, still accounted for approximately 17 percent of public relief employees in Forrest County. Black women comprised less than 2 percent and were restricted almost exclusively to childcare positions. Certainly, white women tended to be more educated and thus more qualified for these types of jobs. But the black community also included several female college graduates and high school teachers, none of whom were given the opportunity for WPA jobs. Perhaps the most nonsensical example of this disparity was the employment of white women by the WPA Writer’s Project to conduct research about the black community. Clearly, some of the black women who actually lived in that community could have provided a better perspective. In fact, some of the basic information reported about local black churches was inaccurate.52
Beyond individual jobs, the greatest discrepancies of New Deal–era relief could be seen in the management and dispersal of federal grants. Proposals made by the all-white Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce and Forrest County board of supervisors were not designed to improve or benefit the black community. Some of the grants helped improve public spaces that explicitly barred all black people. Black Hattiesburgers did not benefit from WPA spending on Hattiesburg High School or the State Teachers College because those institutions did not accept black students or allow black citizens to use their facilities. The same can be said of some of the local parks and libraries that received funding from New Deal programs. And although some black men worked in the road-building projects, most streets selected for improvement were not located in the black community. Of course, this was precisely how many whites believed WPA funding should be managed. As in past eras, local whites took the opportunities provided by others and consolidated them among members of their own race.53
In Hattiesburg, increased WPA spending was accompanied by a brief glimmer of industrial hope. The mid-1930s saw the creation of several hundred new job opportunities. By the spring of 1937, Reliance Manufacturing employed somewhere between 550 and 600 local white workers—almost exclusively women—who worked eight-hour shifts and earned an average of about $12 per week. This was no great fortune. But even $12 per week offered a significantly greater income than the average Mississippian earned during the Great Depression. Reliance jobs had an especially significant impact on the hundreds of white female employees who might otherwise have held no job at all. These earnings helped support hundreds of white families, who in turn contributed to the local economy by spending their wages in local stores. Reliance Manufacturing also contributed directly to Hattiesburg’s economy by purchasing an estimated $100,000 per year in supplies and equipment from local retailers.54
Another northern company opened a new factory in 1935. Recruited through the efforts of the Chamber of Commerce and a loan underwritten by W. S. F. Tatum, a New York–based company opened the Hattiesburg Pioneer Silk Mill that September. By 1937, Pioneer Silk employed over 250 workers who earned an average of about $10 per week. That fall, Pioneer Silk was one of several factories featured in a National Geographic article titled, “Machines Come to Mississippi.” The local white woman who saw her picture in one of America’s most popular magazines was no doubt thrilled.55
According to a WPA study, by the end of 1937, Hattiesburg had nearly forty industrial employers offering jobs for approximately twenty-five hundred workers. The largest employers and their approximate workforces were as follows: Reliance Manufacturing, 550–600; Tatum Lumber, 400; Hercules Powder Company, 400; Pioneer Silk, 250; Meridian Fertilizer, 105; and Gulf States Creosoting, 50. Several additional firms, such as the Gordon-Van Tine Tire Company, Hattiesburg Brick Works, Clinton Lumber, Hub City Ice, and the Weldmech Steel Products Company each employed between twenty-five and forty-five people. And dozens of smaller firms employed fewer than twenty-five people.56
In addition to paying wages, Hattiesburg’s largest employers offered further benefits for local white workers. Reliance Manufacturing provided employees with a nonprofit cafeteria, tennis and basketball courts, and a “Dixie Club” filled with couches, game tables, and a small library. Employees and their families accessed these amenities on lunch breaks, after work, and on weekends. The Dixie Club included a dance hall that hosted Saturday night socials and a variety of fundraisers. Reliance employees also formed their own Employees Mutual Benefit Society that provided healthcare and wage subsidies in case an employee fell ill and could not work.57
Pioneer Silk provided similar benefits. The firm’s white employees also enjoyed access to a clubhouse with reading and music rooms. Pioneer Silk provided local white organizations with access to the club and even offered to pay to have the space cleaned after events. Like Reliance, Pioneer employees enjoyed access to a subsidized cafeteria whose deficits were absorbed by the New York–based company.58
In 1937, the Delaware-based Hercules Powder Company also built a beautiful new clubhouse for employees. Its first floor contained a company store, a restaurant, and a barbershop. The second floor included reading and music rooms with velvet-covered couches, a billiard room, and “one of the most expensive and most modern bowling alleys in Mississippi,” noted the Hattiesburg American, which dubbed the club “one of the most modern structures in [the] state.” Hercules employed both black and white workers, but only whites were allowed full access to the club.59
Nevertheless, despite federal aid and some new jobs, Hattiesburg at the close of the 1930s was far from saved. The Chamber of Commerce did virtually everything it could to increase federal funding and recruit new industries, but the organization simply could never come close to replacing the lost wages of the vanished sawmill jobs. By 1940, Forrest County sawmills employed only 284 men, a number whose significance becomes especially clear by recalling that J. J. Newman Lumber alone had once provided approximately twelve hundred jobs. New companies like Reliance and Pioneer Silk helped the local economy but could not possibly satiate the demand for good jobs. Moreover, the potential benefits of new manufacturing firms were mitigated by a constant stream of migrants looking for work. Between 1930 and 1938, an estimated six thousand people came to the Hattiesburg metropolitan area in search of jobs, boosting the population by about 25 percent. Local merchants might have been quite satisfied with the population increase, but the flood of jobseekers far outpaced the number of new positions offered by either the federal government or private enterprise.60
Another problem was that not all the jobs lasted. After only three years of operation, Pioneer Silk closed in the summer of 1938. Several weeks later, Tatum Lumber closed after forty-five years of operation. After years of struggling to replace jobs, Hattiesburg over three months in 1938 lost an additional five hundred jobs and approximately $325,000 in annual wages. Unless Hattiesburg could find some way to “provide able-bodied people with work,” the Hattiesburg American predicted that autumn, “people will go on the relief until relief stops and then they will have to move away to more fertile fields.” The city still faced a precarious future.61
Many who could not access steady work struggled to survive and were forced to rely on the kindness of others. In 1939 alone, the local Red Cross branch reported 6,913 visits in a county of fewer than thirty-five thousand residents. Hattiesburg swelled with panhandlers and hoboes who slept under bridges or formed large camps on the outskirts of town, periodically skulking into the city to beg at people’s back doors for jobs and meals. “There was never a day during the Depression that people didn’t come by our house for a handout,” one local man remembered. Describing his childhood in the 1930s, Presley Davenport recalled that “they would come to the back door of our house, and mama would always give them something to eat. They’d come to the back door and knock.” Dorothy Musgrove, echoing these memories of home life during the recession, added, “and you know you would fix them a plate of food, whatever you had.” Soup lines stretched far down city streets. “I remember people standing in line,” Musgrove recalled, “all the way a block toward Main Street and around the corner for assistance from the federal government.”62
By 1938, approximately one-third of Hattiesburg’s labor force was either unemployed, partially employed, or employed by federal New Deal programs. The decline of total wages across Mississippi illuminates the bleakness of the state economy at the end of the 1930s. Between 1919 and 1939, the total amount of wages earned by Mississippians decreased from $51 million to just over $27.1 million. Deflation accounts for much of the decline, but the greatest factors were job loss, bankruptcies, and closures.63
Like many cities, Hattiesburg was struggling mightily even with the aid of the federal government and new jobs provided by northern firms such as Reliance and Hercules. It is difficult to imagine Hattiesburg in the 1930s without all the outside aid. In fact, by 1940, the federal government was by far the largest employer of white men in both Hattiesburg and Forrest County. Almost completely reliant on outsiders, Hattiesburg at the close of the 1930s still found itself hapless and depressed, with no permanent solution in sight.64