
          Southern Progressivism
          Reviewed by Egerton, JohnJohn Egerton
          Vol. 6, No. 4, 1984, pp. 23-24
          
          Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress
and Tradition by Dewey W. Grantham. University of Tennessee
Press, 1983. 502 pp.$34.95 cloth, $16.95 paper. paper.
          The Progressive movement that spawned a succession of far-reaching
social reforms in the first quarter of this century is most directly
identified with two maverick northern Republicans--Theodore Roosevelt,
who went to the White House from New York, and Robert M. La Follette,
who went to the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin.
          As the twentieth century began, corrupt political machines and
rapacious corporate giants were stealing the nation blind. In reaction
against those intolerable excesses, many of which were dramatically
exposed by muckraking writers, local and state reform efforts sprang
up and eventually became national in scope.
          The catalog of improvements resulting from these efforts was and is
impressive: regulations of railroads and other corporations, more
equitable tax structures (including a federal income tax), correction
of child labor abuses, health and welfare legislation, wage and hour
laws, food and drug standards, conservation of natural resources,
women's suffrage, and a number of election reforms, to name a few.
          We remember Teddy Roosevelt, the raging "Bull Moose," and "Fighting
Bob" La Follette, and perhaps because of them we think of
Progressivism as a northern phenomenon. The West entered the picture
too, and the Midwest, but somehow the South seemed distant and
uninvolved, like a foreign colony--which in truth it was. The South in
the first two decades of this century generally is pictured as an
agricultural backwater infested with poverty, ignorance, racism, and
despair; that Progressivism might have taken root and flourished there
seems as improbable as azaleas blooming in Buffalo, or magnolias in
Madison.
          And yet, as Dewey Grantham shows us in this painstakingly thorough
and comprehensive study, the winds of change that swept from the East
Coast to the West also reached into the farthest corners of the
South. Grantham's masterful synthesis of a voluminous and diverse
record results in a portrait of the South--and of Progressivism--that
is surprising, provocative, complex, and original.
          In the last half of the nineteenth century, the South tried just
about everything--slavery, war, reconstruction, white supremacy, "New
South" myths, "Old South" memories, economic depression, agrarian
populism, urban development. Nothing worked very well. By 1900, still
traumatized and preoccupied by the indefensible evils in its racial
history, the region was struggling desperately to create yet another
"final solution": legalized segregation of blacks under the guise of
"separate but equal" development.
          In the interest of maintaining firm control over the black
population, southern whites looked first to politics and applied a
series of "social reforms" that included poll taxes, literacy tests,
white primaries, and other measures aimed at disfranchisement of
blacks. This, they reasoned, would reduce "irresponsible" behavior by
the former slave class and bring stability, peace, and progress for
both races. A similar argument was sometimes used in the field of
education: reformers contended that schooling for the white masses
would make them more tolerant of blacks.
          Thus did the South belatedly enter an era of social charge that
resembled what was happening elsewhere in the country. A strange
assortment of conservative reformers and Progressive--demagogues,
racists, religious fundamentalists, moralists, social-gospel
Protestants, gentle visionaries, social scientists, club women,
feminists--found a variety of ways in the first twenty years of the
new century to change institutions, laws, practices, beliefs. Some of
what they did only worsened the racial cancer that had afflicted the
South from the beginning of its history, but other reforms inched the
region toward genuine progress and improvement.
          States--and in some cases local governments--entered into the
regulation of railroads (all northern-owned), banks, and insurance
companies; the licensing of lawyers, doctors, teachers, and other
professionals; the reform of prisons; the prohibition of alcoholic
beverages; the passage of child labor laws; establishment of juvenile
courts and reformatories; the spread and improvement of public school
systems; the creation of institutions for mentally and physically
handicapped people; the enfranchisement of women; the modernization of
municipal services and administration; improvements in public health,
occupational conditions, and agriculture; and even some timid and
halting steps toward improving race relations.
          After an absence of fifty years, the South returned with
Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson to an influential role in national
politics. The Wilson years and the First World War stimulated
Progressivism and national unity in the South, 

and the more optimistic
of the region's reformers predicted continued improvement.
          But by 1920, the South was still mired in poverty, trailing ever
farther behind the rest of the rebounding nation. A post-war rash of
violence against blacks--an ominous portent of the bitter decades to
come--overshadowed continued improvement in schools, highways, health,
and economic opportunity. The Great Depression was yet to arrive, but
the South was long since a depressed region, a threadbare stepchild
too poor to maintain a single society of even minimum quality, yet
insanely committed to the myth of separate but equal development for
its two races. And through those crucial years, few leaders outside
the South--including the reformist Progressives--seriously challenged
the region to change its segregational ways. Instead, the nation as a
whole tended to accommodate itself to the South's racism--and to deny
its own de factor afflictions.
          This sprawling, complex story is unfolded with great skill by Dewey
Grantham, who in his thirty year career at Vanderbilt University has
earned a national reputation as an eminent historian of
twentieth-century America, particularly of the South. It would be a
rare scholar who could absorb and blend such a vast body of recorded
material as this book required; it is even rarer when the resulting
synthesis flows smoothly and clearly.
          The southern Progressives, Grantham concludes, "were able to
function both as agents of modernization and as guardians of southern
tradition." They wanted a new order, not to replace the old but to fit
snugly and comfortably around it. It took them another half-century to
learn that such a dream was not only wrong but impossible.
          
            John Egerton's most recent book is Generations: An
American Family (University of Kentucky Press,
1983).
          
        