Discovering the South: One Mans Travels through a Changing America in the 1930s

During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nations number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. It was also a battlefield on which forces for and against social change were starting to form. For a white southern liberal like Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, it was a fascinating moment to explore. Attuned to culture as well as politics, Daniels knew the true South lay somewhere between Erskine Caldwells Tobacco Road and Margaret Mitchells Gone with the Wind. On May 5, 1937, he set out to find it, driving thousands of miles in his trusty Plymouth and ultimately interviewing even Mitchell herself.

In Discovering the South historian Jennifer Ritterhouse pieces together Danielss unpublished notes from his tour along with his published writings and a wealth of archival evidence to put this one mans journey through a South in transition into a larger context. Danielss well chosen itinerary brought him face to face with the full range of political and cultural possibilities in the South of the 1930s, from New Deal liberalism and social planning in the Tennessee Valley Authority, to Communist agitation in the Scottsboro case, to planters and industrialists reactionary worldview and repressive violence. The result is a lively narrative of black and white southerners fighting for and against democratic social change at the start of the nations long civil rights era.

For more information on this book, see www.discoveringthesouth.org.