Evolving South

...it is even rarer when the resulting synthesis flows smoothly and clearly...

...the passage of child-labor laws...

...And yet, as Dewey Grantham shows us in Southern Progressivism, a 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...

...Instead, the nation as a whole tended to accommodate itself to the South's racism—and to defy its own de facto afflictions...

...But by 1920, the South was still mired in poverty, trailing ever farther behind the rest of the rebounding nation...

...Nothing worked very well...

...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 change that resembled what was happening elsewhere in the country...

...the enfranchisement of women...

...The South in the first two decades of this century generally is pictured as an agricultural backwater infested with poverty, ignorance, racism, and despair...

...John Egerton (John Egerton, a Southerner, has written extensively on the South, past and present...

...that Progressivism might have taken root and flourished there seems as improbable as azaleas blooming in Buffalo...

...His most recent book is "Generations...

...the improvement in public health, occupational conditions, and agriculture, and even some timid, halting steps toward bettering race relations...

...the development of institutions for mentally and physically handicapped people...

...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...

...Some of what they did only aggravated the racial cancer that had afflicted the South from the beginning of its history, but other reforms inched the region toward genuine amelioration...

...The Great Depression was yet to arrive, but the South had long been 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...

...founder of this magazine), who went to the U.S...

...This sprawling, complex story is unfolded with great skill by Dewey Grantham, who in his long career at Vanderbilt University has earned a national reputation as an eminent historian of Twentieth Century America, particularly of the South...

...And through those crucial years, few leaders outside the South—including the reformist Progressives—seriously challenged the region to change its segregationist ways...

...the establishment of juvenile courts and reformatories...

...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...

...States—and in some cases local governments—entered into the regulation of railroads (all Northern-owned), banks, and insurance companies...

...A postwar rash of violence against blacks—an ominous portent of the bitter decades to come— overshadowed continued improvement in schools, highways, health, and economic opportunity...

...It took them another half-century to learn that such a dream was not only wrong but impossible...

...the licensing of lawyers, physicians, teachers, and other professionals...

...Senate from Wisconsin...

...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 reform of prisons...

...A strange assortment of conservative reformers and Progressives—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, and beliefs...

...the spread and improvement of public school systems...

...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...

...the prohibition of alcoholic beverages...

...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. LaFollette Sr...

...We remember Teddy Roosevelt, the raging "Bull Moose," and "Fighting Bob" LaFollette, 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 modernization of municipal services and administration...

...They wanted a new order, not to replace the old but to fit snugly and comfortably around it...

...It would be a rare scholar who could absorb and blend such a vast body of recorded material as Southern Progressivism required...

...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...

...The Southern Progressives, Grantham concludes, "were able to function both as agents of modernization and as guardians of Southern tradition...

...This, they reasoned, would reduce "irresponsible" behavior by the former slave class and bring stability, peace, and progress for both races...

...As the Twentieth Century began, corrupt political machines and rapacious corporate giants were stealing the nation blind...