In 1954, when I was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I paid tribute in an editorial for the Daily Tar Heel to a distinguished predecessor at that illustrious student paper, William T. Polk, who had died unexpectedly. Jonathan W. Daniels, the journalist and editor who had been Polk’s friend and contemporary, mailed a note commenting on my piece and inviting me to visit him at his newspaper office in Raleigh. I soon did so—beginning a friendship that continued until his death in 1981. So, having known Daniels rather well as one of my journalistic elders, I am pleasantly surprised by the perceptiveness with which Jennifer Ritterhouse writes of his era and outlook. Her subject is A Southerner Discovers the South, a Daniels bestseller of 1938, one of a cluster of remarkable contemporaneous works—W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South; C. Vann Woodward’s biography of the chameleon Georgia journalist-politician Tom Watson; and William Alexander Percy’s elegiac Lanterns on the Levee—that announced the South’s awakening from dogmatic slumbers.
The personalities and problems Daniels chronicled following a tour of 10 ex-Confederate states have faded from public consciousness. But that hardly matters, since their stories foreshadowed enduring perplexities. As a liberal journalist, Daniels’s preeminent concern was the case of the “Scottsboro Boys,” nine young black men who hopped a freight train in 1931 and were arrested in Alabama after two mendacious prostitutes accused them of rape. The case epitomized Jim Crow—including corrupt juries that ignored, among other salient facts, one accuser’s repudiation of her testimony. Not even a U.S. Supreme Court decision quashing the original verdict sufficed to end the boys’ decade-long ordeal. The case attracted national and international attention. It had few heroes, save for a bold Alabama judge who set aside one of several jury verdicts, but it had racist villains galore. Daniels, to his credit, editorialized vigorously against these injustices, both in his book and in the Raleigh News and Observer, the newspaper his family owned.
In his book, Daniels also describes visiting the new Tennessee Valley Authority and its director David Lilienthal (later chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission). The TVA was a symbolic New Deal project, bringing electricity to an underdeveloped region and facing down private power interests.
In fact, the depressed Southern economy was a major Daniels topic. The South was caught up in a forced devolution from plantations to small farms. Subdivided land holdings lacked sufficient capital and labor to prosper. Exploitative tenant farming greatly increased. The ’30s was an era of soil erosion, the overproduction of staple crops, drought, and the Dust Bowl. The New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Administration sought, with limited success, to cope with chronic crop surpluses. But the fractionating of land entailed poverty, black and white, that justified FDR’s calling the South “the nation’s No. 1 economic problem.” There had been no Southern Marshall Plan after Appomattox.
Daniels had taken over the editorship of the News and Observer from his father, Josephus, Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of the Navy, a bone-dry Methodist who earned the enmity of naval officers by drying up their wardrooms. Josephus Daniels, incidentally, was no “populist,” as Ritterhouse suggests: He was a bitter enemy of an authentic populism that “fused” with Republicans to capture North Carolina for progressive policies in the 1890s. His attitudes were crudely racist—he sought to drive from the state a distinguished historian, John Spencer Bassett, who dared extol Booker T. Washington as “the greatest man, save General Lee, born in the South in a hundred years.” Jonathan admired his father but was a man of improved attitudes. He faced a revolutionary challenge at the helm of a stodgy family paper, but rose to it.
The younger Daniels’s usual reportorial technique in his brief 1937 Southern hegira was the interview with key players, spiced with irreverence and reinforced by wide reading. Ritterhouse, following his trail after 80 years, has taken pains, as Daniels himself did, to expose the human and cultural variety that lurks behind sweeping designations of the South as a single entity.
Daniels wrote perceptively about the tensions between the “regionalists” of Chapel Hill and the “Agrarians” of Nashville. The former were scholars of a sociological bent, inspired by Howard W. Odum’s influential treatise Southern Regions of the United States. They sought a future free from what they identified as “Lost Cause nostalgia.” By contrast, the Agrarian writers and poets, including such distinguished figures as John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, extolled the best values of the Old South and resisted the siren song of “progress.” The spirits of both schools linger still. At today’s remove it is clear that this argument was more methodological than thematic. The regionalists were analytical, with sociologists like Odum and his protégé Rupert Vance in the vanguard, impatient with quaint appeals to rural leisure. But Odum and Vance were farm boys, acquainted firsthand with the soil. The Agrarians were sheltered, scholarly men of letters, valuing folk memory, some of it imaginary. Scorned by many progressives, they enjoyed a last laugh when “New South” prosperity yielded ill-distributed wealth and urban blight. Jonathan Daniels was not an impartial arbiter, but he made a game effort to give the romantics their due.
The most interesting pages of Ritterhouse’s book recount Daniels’s visit to Atlanta and its star personality, Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind. When Mitchell, a newspaper gossip writer, turned her formidable talent to Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler she struck gold. Daniels treated her and her bestseller, though not her booming city, with sympathetic detachment and intelligence.
Ritterhouse, a professor of history at George Mason University, has offered an uncommonly well-informed reexamination of the Dixie of the latter Depression, abstaining from the moralism that often flaws the historical writing of her generation. That she views the South of the 1930s (and after) through an elder’s eye is a strength, not a weakness. In the period just before publishing his book, Jonathan Daniels had come to terms with his limited gift for fiction and turned, in his “discovery” of the South, to higher reportage. What he didn’t know, he took pains to learn; the same may be said of the historian who now follows his tracks. The resulting blend of generational perspectives deserves a place on the small shelf of enduring Southern studies.
Edwin M. Yoder Jr. is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former editor and columnist in Washington.
