Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s.

Southern Mothers: Fact and Fictions in Southern Women’s Writing.

The Reposed.

The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in 19th-Century Virginia.

Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860-1865.

Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s.
By Pete Daniel.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
378 pages, 92 illustrations. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Pete Daniel’s new book captures the excitement and drama of the 1950s. It was not the happy days of myth, but a time of unresolved tensions and conflicts. Daniel gives a striking portrait of working-class cultural achievements, especially in sports and music, and the tragic failure of Southern politicians and most of the white population to imagine a South beyond racial segregation.

The story begins in the rural South. Federal government policies and farm mechanization, together with the uprootings of World War II, led to a depopulation of the countryside. Daniel faults the United States Department of Agriculture for policies catering to large farmers and ignoring the desperation of tenants and small farmers, whose efforts to make new lives led to much of the creativity of the period. His account of the environmental damage that came through the government's abuse of pesticides in this era is disturbing reading. He portrays agricultural bureaucrats as right out of 1950s science fiction films. They declared war on the Argentine fire ants, and the massive destruction war against them “eerily fit the 1950s obsession with foreign agents, gigantic insects, bureaucratic bullying, and unintended consequences.” The Southern countryside was in turmoil, as agribusiness consolidated with help from the government.

The best parts of Lost Revolutions deal with “lowdown culture,” Daniel’s term for the working- class culture of the last generation of sharecroppers and their children, who would “bend United States culture to their purposes.” One expression of it was stock car racing, which emerged in the Piedmont South among people who lived hard lives and found in the speed and power of stock cars the entertainment to help them make the transition from rural areas to cities. Daniel loves their untamed energy, and he does not hide their violence, womanizing, and excessive drinking. One driver recalled thinking that “we’ll take it down the straightaway and let Lord Calvert take it through the turns.” Lowdown culture flouted authority and upended conventional expectations, creating the successful stock car industry.

Daniel is even more taken with the creativity of the biracial musical renaissance of the 1950s, and he focuses his discussion of it on Memphis, Tennessee. He sees Sam Phillips succeeding at Sun Studios because of his understanding of the untamed streak in performers like Elvis Presley and his ability to nurture its expression. Musicians, black and white, transgressed racial boundaries in their search for musical insight, offering a model for integration based on good will.

Much of this book, though, deals with the failed efforts of whites to embrace a positive model of social change, as the same young whites who were authentic cultural rebels in music, dress, and style became enforcers of their parents’ codes of racial etiquette, seen in crisis moments like the integration of Central High School in Little Rock. Daniel has a firm hand on class analysis, seeing the middle class as leading massive resistance against integration because its members were only recent, and precarious, members of that class, with their claims to respectability still resting on their white skins.

This book is wholly original. Daniel’s thorough research brings forth new details and his powers of interpretation refocus Southern history at many points. In writing of the civil rights movement, we see little of Martin Luther King, Jr., and organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Instead, we read of the brilliant organizer and social activist Ella Baker, who saw in the sit-in students of 1960 a revolutionary force and helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He pays proper tribute, in fact, to the key role of women in bringing social reform in the South.

The revolutionary energy that came out of the Southern working class in the 1950s was stymied by a counterrevolution of massive resistance to integration and the power of agribusiness, which together poisoned, in Daniel’s view, race relations and the environment. Still, that energy had many creative successes, in sports, music, and style. Most whites of the 1950s rejected the rock ’n’ roll model of biracial cooperation and goodwill, but its memory might still inspire us to see ways that creative achievements can provide models of biracial cooperation with meaning for the broader search for social justice.

Charles Reagan Wilson

Southern Mothers: Fact and Fictions in Southern Women’s Writing.
Edited by Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.
233 pages. $39.95.

Essay collections usually do one of two things: add fresh insight to an established body of criticism or posit various approaches to a relatively unexplored topic. Southern Mothers: Fact and Fictions in Southern Women's Writing does both. Many of the authors whose fiction is treated here--Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, for example--are anchored in the canon of American literature, and Southern women's literature itself now receives considerable attention in both academic circles and the popular press. But the focus Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff attach to their volume allows it to hone in on a dimension of Southern women’s lives that literary criticism has not dealt with in any sustained fashion. Their goal, they write, is to “probe the extent to which southern women writers have rejected or embraced the individual, social, and cultural understanding of the institution of motherhood” (1). The result is a grouping of essays that provides both scholars and general readers a foundation for much further reading and research.

The table of contents for Southern Mothers immediately complicates conventional literary images of Southern womanhood. Here are essays about Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, for instance, and Margaret Walker’s Jubilee. The slave women featured in these texts are obviously at odds with privileged white figures like Kate Chopin’s Edna or Ellen Glasgow’s Virginia, who also appear in the volume, yet all of these women share the experience of motherhood. That common bond means that white and black figures from the South’s storied past and its substantially changed present come together in the book to offer various images and accounts of being a woman--and a mother--in the South.

Using motherhood as a lens, the authors of essays about Chopin, Glasgow, Katherine Ann Porter, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty expand the way readers and teachers consider authors they might believe they already may know well. For example, critics often discuss The Awakening as a feminist text that reveals the protagonist’s ambivalence about motherhood. But shifting the focus to Edna’s own parentage and the fact that she herself is motherless from a young age, as Virginia Ross does in her essay, deepens the reader's understanding of Edna's behavior. In contrast, one of the volume's strongest and most provocative entries, Lucinda MacKethan’s “The Waste Land Women of The Wave,” is a fascinating consideration of the work of Evelyn Scott, a writer contemporary with the Southern Renaissance but one whose feminized modernism has often isolated her from discussions of the period. MacKethan reads the images of maternity that dominate Scott’s autobiographical Escapade and her monumental novel, The Wave, as connected to the images of withered fertility that emerge from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In another interesting juxtaposition, Kathryn Lee Seidel examines Gail Godwin’s conscious references to the women of Ellen Glasgow’s writing, which predates Godwin’s by nearly half a century. Linking two presently publishing authors--Alice Walker and relative newcomer Tina McElroy Ansa--Nagueyalti Warren studies their revisions of the African American mother figure as she has been cast in the writings of white authors. Rosemary Magee’s “From Grandmother to Mother to Me” addresses the power of intergenerational links in the lives of female characters featured in the fiction of three contemporary writers, Barbara Kingsolver, Jill McCorkle, and Kaye Gibbons. Her essay, with its emphasis on connection, provides a fitting example of one of the volume’s most powerful suggestions: to read Southern women’s literature aright, we must read the fabric of the whole. Isolated pieces do not so clearly reveal tropes of Southern motherhood, yet they exist in a community of women often reading and responding to one another.

But all of these essays, finally, can be classified as fairly conventional literary criticism in terms of form and methodology. The runaway favorite of Southern Mothers--the essay you’ll be thinking about for days after you put the book down--is the volume’s first one, Minrose Gwin’s “Hearing My Mad Mother's Voices.” Gwin, an accomplished critic of the South’s literature in her own right, offers here an autobiographical clip that traces her mother’s slow dissolution into dementia and the lifelong effects of being that woman’s daughter. Even in this excerpt from a longer work, Gwin reveals her ability to probe that most powerful of relationships, from stormy verbal exchanges to the vibrating scent of couch pillows that trigger an avalanche of unspecified memories. I’ve read much of Gwin’s literary criticism, but she hasn’t written anything better than these 15 pages.

Gwin’s essay sets a high standard for the volume. But like most essay collections, the quality of the individual pieces in Southern Mothers varies, and we might wish, for example, that it included more essays like Joan Hall’s “‘White mamma . . . black mammy,’” which explores the interracial domestic dynamic between women in the fiction of enormously popular 19th-century writer Ruth McEnery Stuart. In fact, of the 14 essays in Southern Mothers, only four deal at all with pre-1900 literature (two of these with Harriet Jacobs), leaving the reader to wonder about the literary antecedents for patterns in the fiction of the contemporary writers who dominate the volume. How have portrayals of mothers in the South’s literature differed over time, for example? How did notions of motherhood in the South support or resist the postbellum images of Southern women that emerge in the construction of the Lost Cause? How have Southern women writers reconciled their authorial roles and their maternal ones? How have Southern male writers depicted mothers and do those portrayals differ markedly from the images women have produced? In many ways these unanswered questions are one of the volume's strengths; a thoughtful exploration of Southern motherhood only begins here, propelled by the issues naturally arising from reading this collection.

Kathryn McKee

The Reposed.
Photographs by William K. Greiner. Foreword by Thomas Lynch. Introduction by Steven Maklansky.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.
125 pages, 62 color photographs. $39.95.

The Reposed is the culmination of photographer William K. Greiner’s decade-long fascination with the burial grounds of south Louisiana, especially the varied forms of display exhibited by individual grave markers. The book contains 62 color photographs, all made in cemeteries in or around New Orleans. It’s quite a handsome piece of work. Printed from medium-format color negatives, the images are crisp and clear, and the color reproductions ring true, despite the deeply saturated, almost psychedelic, quality of their palette. The photographs are printed one to each full-page spread--the image filling up the right-hand page and facing a left-hand page that remains blank except for title, location, and date information, printed very small. This lets us encounter the photographs one at a time, without distraction, and perhaps encourages us to spend extra time with each. Because the pictures are not crowding in on each other, we feel no need to hurry through them. In this sense, looking at The Reposed is not unlike spending a leisurely afternoon strolling through a rural graveyard.

In aggregate, The Reposed is about loss and the public face of grief. It is also about death and the varied, often contradictory, meanings death holds for the living. To Greiner’s credit, his photographs call forth both the extraordinary nature of death and its utter banality. They make us realize the finality of death for those who have died and help us understand how much effort the living can put into making the memories of departed loved ones live on. (They also demonstrate how quickly the dead are sometimes forgotten, despite such efforts.) In good postmodern fashion, the book’s title has a double meaning. On the most literal level, of course, “reposed” denotes the dead, those who are at rest. More connotatively, however, the word also hints at a sense of the dead being “re-posed”--as in repositioned or represented--by the living for one final (and permanent) public display. It's always the living, Greiner’s photographs seem to say, who have the last say when it comes to constructing how the dead will be remembered.

Unfortunately, the images in The Reposed are a bit uneven, and this is the book’s biggest weakness. The best of Greiner’s photographs--and there are quite a number of very good ones--go beyond mere physical appearance, simultaneously dealing with subject matter and theme on the literal, figurative, and emotional levels. They seem appreciative of both beauty and irony and are often graceful, humorous, and intelligent. In Frame with Red Lips, for example, we see a grave decorated with an empty picture frame festooned with dead flowers. Next to the grave, hanging from a small section of wire fencing, is a pair of very full, bright red plastic lips silhouetted against the sky. The lips are puckered as though offering a kiss to anyone who might happen by. They are pointed away from the picture frame, however, thus seeming to exclude the deceased, whose image once filled the frame, from the offer. In an alternate interpretation, one might also imagine these lips within the frame, intimating a presence no longer visible. Tentacle Vein [sic] is similarly engaging. In this photograph, a cross atop a grave is almost obscured by a tangled vine that twists all around itself and seems to explode in every direction. We get the sense of a simple, orderly, rational life being overwhelmed by something complicated, wild and irrational. There are a number of such images in The Reposed--photographs containing multiple levels of complex potential meaning.

And this fact makes the less good pictures stand out like sore thumbs. These are photographs that operate on the level of visual puns or are about nothing more than color. In Elk Statue and Trees, an elk made tiny by distance seems to perch in a foreground tree. Pretty clever, huh? In Storm Front, a threatening line of dark clouds is contrasted with a gravestone that reads “Einstein.” Get it? Of similar superficiality is Water, in which we see a sign that says “WATER” among several above-ground crypts. Next to the sign is a bright orange trash can. One supposes that the trash can's bright color was the reason for the photograph in the first place, if only because there seems no other reason for it. In any event, it's not reason enough. These images and others like them are immediately forgettable, except in the glaring contrast they make with the many fine photographs in The Reposed. As it is, it’s a nice book. With stronger editing, it would have been considerably better.

David Wharton

The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in 19th-Century Virginia.
By Beth Barton Schweiger.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
251 pages. $49.95.

It seems fair to say that much of the best scholarship on Southern religious history is written either in anger or defense. Scholars writing in anger ask why the religion of white Southerners has not done more to inspire opposition to slavery, racism, and other injustices. They ask why Southern religion was so interested in defining sin as personal immorality and not in addressing the life of the society. They ask why Southern religion has been so opposed to new ideas and so unconcerned with the life of the mind. Scholars writing in defense tend to say that those preconceptions are either wrong or overstated. Those argue that Southern religion was more diverse than it often seems, that it has had its share of radicals, mavericks, and innovators, and that many Southern religious figures addressed important social issues.

Beth Barton Schweiger’s The Gospel Working Up: Progress and the Pulpit in 19th-Century Virginia helps get beyond some of those dichotomies by looking closely at the lives, goals, and language of 800 white Methodist and Baptist preachers between 1830 and 1900. The book argues that most of those preachers saw themselves as helping to bring what they defined as progress to their communities. One way to understand the distinctiveness of this volume is by considering what it does not say. It does not say that Methodist and Baptist preachers were so fixated on saving sinners that they were not really interested in anything else. Instead, it argues that those preachers sought to change their world through organization-building, education, and example as well as through evangelizing. Theology is important in this study but never the primary factor determining how the preachers thought and acted. Secondly, the book does not say that preachers always assumed things were on the decline. Religious scholars, building on the approach of Perry Miller, have long been attracted to stories of religious people who feared they had lost the old-time religion. In Southern religious history, that old-time virtue often seemed either the rough-hewn piety of denominational founders or, to people in the postbellum South, the glory days of the antebellum South. According to Schweiger, however, the preachers spoke of progress far more than declension, and they kept up a generally optimistic attitude about the world and their place in it.

Several themes scholars often ignore, at least in part because they do not seem distinctive to Southern history, emerge as crucial in this study. Towns and cities, for example, were the center of cultural activity and ideas about progress. Preachers saw the move from the country to a town or city church as a move up, where they could draw on (and make) more money, change more lives, and be part of larger organizations. Education emerges as having more religious importance than virtually any scholar has seen. Not only were church colleges important in training religious leaders; churches and especially their preachers were Virginia’s leading spokesmen for literacy. “Religion provided both the motive and the means to read” (67). Finally, denomination-building was crucial to these preachers. Many scholars take literally Baptists’ professed distrust for institutions beyond the level of the individual congregation, but both Baptists and Methodists worked hard to help build up the wealth, power, and organizational complexity of their denominations.

Progress, for these preachers, was not a millennial idea of movement toward a perfect society. It meant more sophisticated sermons, less emotion in religious services, the spread of genteel manners throughout society, the use of professional methods of spreading the gospel, and, by the late 1800s, working harder to send missionaries throughout the world.

Well-written and bound to be controversial, Schweiger’s portrayal of these Methodists and Baptists is one the preachers themselves would have recognized. She shows them not as cultural outsiders criticizing their society, nor as conservatives always captive to it, but as optimistic folks trying to increase the size and extend the influence of their churches.

Ted Ownby

Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860-1865.
Edited by Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
933 pages, index, maps, illustrations. $45.00.

Brooks Simpson and Jean Berlin have given serious scholars and dedicated Civil War buffs a glimpse of seldom seen aspects of William Tecumseh Sherman. These letters are not the official reports published elsewhere, but are personal letters to his wife, brother, other family members, and to a few major military officers. Nevertheless, Sherman’s vision of the Civil War and its participants both white and black, Union and Confederate come through clearly. The editors selected the letters with care, and while presenting them with corrected spelling, they maintained the flavor and the nuances of the original ones. This volume, as its title indicates, will help the careful reader to understand Sherman’s Civil War.

The volume begins with Sherman’s letter to Ellen Ewing Sherman, dated November 3, 1860, and ends with his poignant Special Field Order No. 76, May 30, 1865, in which he announced that "our work is done," but if hostilities should break out again, “‘Sherman's Army’ will be the first to buckle on its old arms and come forth” (908-9). Altogether, more than 550 letters provide insights into the ideas, attitudes, strengths, and shortcomings of a modern warrior. Each of the 15 chapters begins with a brief introduction summarizing the events in that selected time period. While some readers may wish that the editors had included more explanatory footnotes, this reviewer applauds their choice to limit editorial comments.

More than half of the letters are related to events immediately preceding Shiloh and continuing until Sherman left Mississippi to begin his Nashville to Atlanta campaign. These letters vividly portray the ghosts that haunted him from his experiences in the Department of the Ohio, with the criticisms of his actions at Shiloh, and his failure at Chickasaw Bayou. But, they also show his military concepts changing from a traditional view to his more modern policy of attacking his enemy's will to win. While serving as the appointed commander at Memphis, Sherman had to contend with the pro-Confederate civilian population and partisan who waged a sometimes guerrilla- like war. He quickly moved from returning fire on anyone firing at Union boats plying the Mississippi River, to burning a river side town in retaliation, to the more thorough concept of destroying any civilian property that might be used against the Union. Sherman honed his concept of convincing civilians that war against the Union was futile when he saw the potential resources available to Confederates during his conference with General U. S. Grant at Oxford, Mississippi. Sherman put his war against civilian property into operation during the Meridian campaign, and thoroughly deployed it in the March to the Sea and again to Columbia, South Carolina. Sherman was often dismayed that taking the war to the civilians was not more effective in destroying the Confederate will to win.

The editors did not intend to present a full picture of Sherman’s battles or campaigns, but the selected letters open a door to William Tecumseh Sherman’s maturing military concepts and to his complex personality. In that sense, they are a welcomed addition to a Civil War library. Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin are to be congratulated for the handsomely presented and perceptively selected letters of William Tecumseh Sherman.

Harry P. Owens