Paternalism In A Southern City

These essays look at southern social customs within a single city in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, the volume focuses on paternalism between masters and slaves, husbands and wives, elites and the masses, and industrialists and workers. How Augusta's millworkers, homemakers, and others resisted, exploited, or endured the constraints of paternalism reveals the complex interplay between race, class, and gender. One essay looks at the subordinating effects of paternalism on women in the Old South--slave, free black, and white--and the coping strategies available to each group. Another focuses on the Knights of Labor union in Augusta. With their trappings of chivalry, the Knights are viewed as a response by Augusta's white male millworkers to the emasculating "maternalism" to which they were subjected by their own wives and daughters and those of mill owners and managers. Millworkers are also the topic of a study of mission work in their communities, a study that gauges the extent to which religious outreach by elites was a means of social control rather than an outpouring of genuine concern for worker welfare. Other essays discuss Augusta's "aristocracy of color," who had to endure the same effronteries of segregation as the city's poorest blacks; the role of interracial cooperation in the founding of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church as a denomination, and of Augusta's historic Trinity CME Church; and William Jefferson White, an African American minister, newspaper editor, and founder of Morehouse College. The varied and creative responses to paternalism discussed here open new ways to view relationships based on power and negotiated between men and women, blacks and whites, and the prosperous and the poor.

This book asks how we understand the relationship between ethics and power in humanitarian action.

Individual case studies explore the artisans' worlds on a more personal level, introducing us to the lives and work of such individuals as William Price Talmage, a journeyman; Reuben King, an artisan who became a planter; and Jett Thomas, one of the first master builders to leave his mark on Georgia's architecture."--BOOK JACKET.

William Frederick "Billy" Klair (1875-1937) was the undisputed czar of Lexington, Kentucky, for decades. As political boss in a mid-sized, southern city, he faced problems strikingly similar to those of large cities in the North. As he watched the city grow from a sleepy market town of 16,000 residents to a bustling, active urban center of over 50,000, Klair saw changes that altered not just Lexington but the nation and the world: urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. But Klair did not merely watch these changes; like other political bosses and social reformers, he actively participated in the transformation of his city. As a political boss and a practitioner of what George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall referred to as "honest graft," Klair applied lessons of organization, innovation, manipulation, power, and control from the machine age to bring together diverse groups of Lexingtonians and Kentuckians as supporters of a powerful political machine. James Duane Bolin also examines the underside of the city, once known as the Athens of the West. He balances the postcard view of Bluegrass mansions and horse farms with the city's well-known vice district, housing problems, racial tensions, and corrupt politics. With the reality of life in Lexington as a backdrop, the career of Billy Klair provides as a valuable and engaging case study of the inner workings of a southern political machine.

Offering a fresh look at interracial cooperation in the formative years of Jim Crow, The Uplift Generation examines how segregation was molded, not by Virginia’s white political power structure alone but rather through the work of a generation of Virginian reformers across the color line who from 1900 to 1930 engaged in interracial reforms. This group of paternalists and uplift reformers believed interracial cooperation was necessary to stem violence and promote progress. Although these activists had varying motivations, they worked together because their Progressive aims meshed, finding themselves unlikely allies. Unlike later incarnations of interracialism, this early work did not challenge segregation but rather helped to build and define it, intentionally and otherwise. The initiatives—whose genesis ranged from private one-on-one communications to large-scale interracial organizations—shaped Progressivism, the emergence of a race-conscious public welfare system, and the eventual parameters of Jim Crow in Virginia. Through extensive use of personal papers, newspapers, and other archival materials, The Uplift Generation shares the stories of these fascinating—yet often forgotten—reformers and the complicated and sometimes troubling consequences of their work.

"A richly detailed study of the rise of the Bahá’í Faith in South Carolina. There isn’t another study out there even remotely like this one."--Paul Harvey, coauthor of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America "A pioneering study of how and why the Bahá’í Faith became the second largest religious community in South Carolina. Carefully researched, the story told here fills a significant gap in our knowledge of South Carolina's rich and diverse religious history."--Charles H. Lippy, coauthor of Religion in Contemporary America The emergence of a cohesive interracial fellowship in Jim Crow-era South Carolina was unlikely and dangerous. However, members of the Bahá’í Faith in the Palmetto State rejected segregation, broke away from religious orthodoxy, and defied the odds, eventually becoming the state’s largest religious minority. The religion, which emphasizes the spiritual unity of all humankind, arrived in the United States from the Middle East at the end of the nineteenth century via urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest. Expatriate South Carolinians converted and when they returned home, they brought their newfound religion with them. Despite frequently being the targets of intimidation, and even violence, by neighbors, the Ku Klux Klan, law enforcement agencies, government officials, and conservative clergymen, the Bahá’ís remained resolute in their faith and their commitment to an interracial spiritual democracy. In the latter half of the twentieth century, their numbers continued to grow, from several hundred to over twenty thousand. In No Jim Crow Church, Louis Venters traces the history of South Carolina’s Bahá’í community from its early origins through the civil rights era and presents an organizational, social, and intellectual history of the movement. He relates developments within the community to changes in society at large, with particular attention to race relations and the civil rights struggle. Venters argues that the Bahá’ís in South Carolina represented a significant, sustained, spiritually-based challenge to the ideology and structures of white male Protestant supremacy, while exploring how the emergence of the Bahá’í Faith in the Deep South played a role in the cultural and structural evolution of the religion.

One of the most hotly debated issues in the historical study of race relations is the question of how the Civil War and Reconstruction affected social relations in the South. Did the War leave class and race hierarchies intact? Or did it mark the profound disruption of a long-standing social order? Yankee Town, Southern City examines how the members of the southern community of Lynchburg, Virginia experienced four distinct but overlapping events--Secession, Civil War, Black Emancipation, and Reconstruction. By looking at life in the grog shop, at the military encampment, on the street corner, and on the shop floor, Steven Elliott Tripp illustrates the way in which ordinary people influenced the contours of race and class relations in their town.

A powerful critique of nudge theory and the paternalist policies of behavioral economics, and an argument for a more inclusive form of rationality.

Contributions by Catherine Clinton, Joseph Crespino, Jane Dailey, Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Anya Jabour, John F. Kasson, Jennifer Ritterhouse, and Charles F. Robinson II The concept of southern manners may evoke images of debutantes being introduced to provincial society or it might conjure thoughts of the humiliating behavior white supremacists expected of African Americans under Jim Crow. The essays in Manners and Southern History analyze these topics and more. Scholars here investigate the myriad ways in which southerners from the Civil War through the civil rights movement understood manners. Contributors write about race, gender, power, and change. Essays analyze the ways southern white women worried about how to manage anger during the Civil War, the complexities of trying to enforce certain codes of behavior under segregation, and the controversy of college women's dating lives in the raucous 1920s. Writers study the background and meaning of Mardi Gras parades and debutante balls, the selective enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws, and arguments over the form that opposition to desegregation should take. Concluding essays by Jane Dailey and John F. Kasson summarize and critique the other articles and offer a broader picture of the role that manners played in the social history of the South.