Dochuk Wins Dunning Prize

Paul Harvey

Late breaking news -- I heard *rumor* at the Southern Hist. Association meeting that our friend Darren Dochuk had won yet another award for his book From Bible Belt to Sunbelt -- and remember we did an extensive interview with the author here and here.

Rumor was right: Darren has been awarded the Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association, named every other year for "the best book on any subject pertaining to the history of the United States." Wow!

Previous winners make a list of "hall of famers" for recent historians -- including Daniel Usner, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Nick Salvatore, Peggy Pascoe, and others. You historians out there will recognize that as an all-star lineup for real.

Between the Dunning Prize and our contributor Deg winning the C. Vann Woodward award from the SHA, it's been a good week for contributors and friends of the blog. I was fortunate to get to hang out with Deg a bit at the SHA (happily for him, while watching UGA beat Florida), and hope to do the same soon with Darren at the AHA in January. Congratulations to all! I might mention that Dochuk was a Lilly Fellow at Valparaiso in 2006--07, following an august lineup of historians who made good use of the same postdoc, including John McGreevy, John Fea, and Mike Utzinger. Of course, I held the fellowship 1993-95, but enough time has passed that the ignominy caused by my time there has passed, and Fea, Dochuk, Utzinger, and others have restored honor to the program.

New Issue of the Journal of Southern Religion

Luke Harlow and I are pleased to announce the new volume of the Journal of Southern Religion:

Our features include:

--An article by Chad Seales (University of Texas-Austin) on baptisteries and modernity.

--A roundtable on class in early twentieth-century southern religion, with contributions and responses from Ken Fones-Wolf (West Virginia University), Richard Callahan, Jr. (University of Missouri-Columbia), Jarod Roll (University of Sussex), Alison Collis Greene (Mississippi State University), and John Hayes (Augusta State University).

--An author's reflection on Evangelizing the South by Monica Najar (Lehigh University).

--A review forum on Daniel Williams's God's Own Party, with reviews by Randall Balmer (Columbia University), Darren Dochuk (Purdue University), J. Russell Hawkins (Indiana Wesleyan University), and Mark Silk (Trinity College), and a response from Daniel Williams (University of West Georgia).

--Twenty-six book reviews on the latest scholarship in the field.

Emily Clark, managing editor, and Art Remillard, book review editor, contributed immensely to helping make this issue happen.

Luke and I would like to invite everyone to consider contributing to the next issue of the JSR. As an online journal, we are in the exciting position to compliment traditional articles and book reviews with innovative content like special topic forums, author reflections, interviews, and audio-visual presentation. Any and all ideas are welcomed.

The Bible Belt Blues

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

Hal Crowther—essayist, journalist, southerner—is upset with his co-regionalists. Indeed, he’s been distressed for some time (see his previous books Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millennial South [2005] and Cathedrals of Kudzu: A Personal Landscape of the South [2000]). “Evangelical religion of an extreme stripe—fire and brimstone, biblical inerrancy—thrives in many far corners of the republic,” he writes in a recent edition of the Oxford American, “but the South is its wellspring and its homeland.” He continues, “Feral religion has been the South’s second greatest embarrassment, after race. Unfortunately, they’ve been closely linked.” Terry Jones, the Gainesville preacher who promoted “International Burn a Koran Day,” is just the latest example of southern humiliation that Crowther associates with “[t]he unctuous, nausea-inducing Pat Robertson” and the “Southern fundamentalists [who] have bonded with the Tea party and politicized their pulpits.” Like I said, he’s not happy.

While singing what he calls the “Bible Belt Blues,” Crowther is also searching for “rays of light” that might signal the unbuckling of southern bucklehood. He looks to the Baylor graduate Edwin Gaustad for reassurance that the Virginian Thomas Jefferson had “an undying anxiety of anything that would bring church and state together.” He calls on the UNC biblical scholar Bart Ehrman to explain how “the Bible is a deceptive literary grabbag authored by just about everyone except God.” He wishes that the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s conception “of a God inseparable from Nature, from Creation,” would replace the “hellfire Christianity” of today’s mainstream white South. And he finds in his own universalist/pantheist beliefs a model for southerners to keep their religion to themselves. “The important part of religion,” Crowther concludes, “is what you believe when you’re in your room alone, not what you profess to believe in a crowd of believers.”

After reading Crowther’s essay a few months ago, the cynical-me wanted to tell Crowther, “Good luck with that, Hal. Good luck making southerners into Emersonians, much less Spinozans. Hell, good luck getting folks to read Spinoza.” The political-me wanted to give Crowther a high-five. And the religious studies/historian-me just had to calm down and appreciate some fine writing.

As someone who spends a lot of time thinking and writing about religion in the American South, I like to go to the Oxford American (the self-described “Southern Magazine of Good Writing”) for perspectives on southern culture that manage to avoid the sappiness of Southern Living and the scholarliness of the Journal of Southern History. I like to ask myself, as Crowther does in his introduction to Gather at the River, “Why, then, are libraries bursting with dissertations on the metaphysics of Southernness, why are panels convened, sages summoned, centers dedicated to the study of the Tao of Dixie? Why is Southern separateness—among the reflective class no less than the belligerent—an enduring strain of separateness no other American region can approach or comprehend?” It’s an old, some might say tired question, but I love asking it and trying to answer it.

In the next week or so, Luke Harlow and I will be releasing the latest edition of the Journal of Southern Religion. The JSR started in 1998 under the editorship of Rodger Payne, now chair of the Department of Religious Studies at UNC-Asheville. Its first issue included Ted Ownby’s review of Paul Harvey’s Redeeming the South and a review forum on Christine Heyrman’s Southern Cross (with reviews by E. Brooks Holifield and Ann Taves). R. Marie Griffith and Joel Martin commented on the film The Apostle and Sam Hill wrote an article called “Fundamentalism in Recent Southern Culture.” Check it out; it’s kinda fun.

Last year, Luke and I relieved Randall Stephens of his editorial duties. If you know Randall, then you know we’ve got big shoes to fill. We’ll be sure to announce the JSR release on the blog.

The Gospel of the Working Class: Gellman/Roll Interview, Part III

By Heath Carter

The final installment of my interview with Erik Gellman and Jarod Roll: _________________________

HC: What factors best explain why some were attracted to this radical gospel and others were not? Are there underlying unities within the diverse spectrum of persons that populate your narrative?

EG: Embracing this radical gospel was not the easy path. It meant risking your livelihood and defying the dominant cultural norms of Jim Crow, not to mention class and gender assumptions about who had the right to lead and wield power in America. Many people who embraced this gospel did so during the 1930s when deprivation had become so widespread that people had the ability, as a result of dire circumstances, to radically reorient their cultural identity. Thus, working people and poor people, who often were cast out or dismissed by liberals and middle-class professionals, often listened to this radical gospel. But many people in the working class also listened to Charles Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith, and hundreds of other right-wing religious preachers of their day, because their explanations of the injustice in the world had simple solutions. Embracing fascist ideas, including the hatred of other races, was easier than the alternative of interracial and militant organizing against the American mainstream. Meanwhile, others embraced what Whitfield denounced as “sky pilot” and “pie-in-the-sky” type preachers who did not orient them for action but provided them with personal and emotional styles of worship.

JR: One aspect of the research that really stood out was the power both Whitfield and Williams possessed as speakers, the way that the Spirit seemed to move through the words they spoke, at least in the sense that they moved hearts and minds in their direction. They each had a remarkable ability to convince those who heard them preach, whether the hearer was a coal miner, a sharecropper, a factory worker, or a sympathetic liberal. They also did well with those who opposed them, if they could get in earshot. Williams converted a number of Ku Klux Klan members to work alongside blacks, while Whitfield commonly moved secular or nationalist African Americans to his side. The power of their speech, when delivered in person, also impressed a range of more well known people, including Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Ralph Ellison, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie. Some were leery of this ability and likened it to demagoguery, perhaps not without cause. Williams used his oratorical skills to propel the STFU membership to vote to join the CIO against the wishes of some union leaders. Whitfield, on the other hand, could inspire rank-and-file union members to take wildcat action during the war despite the no-strike directives handed down by his bosses in the CIO.

Williams even had this effect on historians who met him in the 1960s. Donald Grubbs, for example, interviewed him in the course of the research that would become his book on the STFU and the New Deal. He was not sure there was any point, since he considered Williams to be an unreliable self-server (a view he got from talking to H. L. Mitchell, the STFU leader, who fell out with Williams in the late 1930s). But during the course of the interview Williams worked his magic on Grubbs, who left with no doubt about the preacher’s religious conviction. Moreover, he came away certain that Williams was far more important than he had ever given him credit for and that historians had to take his view of the southern labor movement seriously if they were to understand it properly.

Sadly no recordings exist of Whitfield and Williams preaching in their prime, so we can’t really know what they sounded like in full flood. There is a recording of Williams talking to civil rights activists in the 1960s, and one can get a sense of the power that the then aged preacher must have had in his heyday.

Both were such impressive writers and speakers that we wanted the book to provide space for each to speak, or at least for the reader to get a good sense of their voices in the pulpit. We decided to do this with two interchapters that each delivers a sermon, one by Williams and one by Whitfield, with as little interjection from us as possible. I think they work really well in the course of the narrative, because they break our biographical story and give the reader direct contact with extended texts as delivered by each preacher, hopefully with some feeling for the historical scene, of what it might have been like to be there. We wanted the reader to have the opportunity to hear the working class gospel straight from its two greatest evangelists.

HC: Your story is centered geographically in the South but also ventures out to Detroit, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. To what extent is this a southern story versus a national one? Are there elements of it that you take to be more broadly representative?

JR: We’ve framed the story as one of “southern prophets” taking their message into New Deal America. Whitfield and Williams both argued that the nation’s problems originated in the South and had to be addressed there before the US itself could be saved. So, it is both a southern story and a national one. The two preachers came to this political view in part because of their religious training. Williams and his wife Joyce began their careers as Presbyterians who felt called to take the gospel into hostile terrain, to serve as missionaries in their native South. In fact Joyce had studied to be a missionary at Bethel College in Tennessee, where she first met Claude. Whitfield, on the other hand, entered the ministry because of his experience as a student at Okolona Industrial School in Mississippi. Wallace Battle, the leader of the school, trained his students in a spirit of civic service, which bid them to use their privileges as educated southern blacks to lead their families and neighbors to better lives. Whitfield came away from this with a strong sense that God intended for him to serve as a Moses for his people. Whitfield followed this charge when he moved with his family to Arkansas and then to the new lands opening up in Missouri in the early 1920s. There he melded his spirit of service with religious leadership in the Garvey movement. When both Whitfield and Williams joined together to take their gospel to the nation at large, they were both acting in a way consistent with the sense of calling that had brought each of them into the ministry in the first place.

EG: Great question. This story fits with the historiography of many scholars of the twentieth century who make cogent arguments that the South has a huge influence on the rest of America. Also, our book confirms that this era was one of migration from rural enclaves to urban ones. But I would hope our narrative complicates both of those ideas. The workers in this story seem to migrate in circles rather than from North to South, from rural to urban. And while rural cultural traits brought by workers into urban areas help explain why the radical gospel of Williams and Whitfield, based on rural experiences, often succeeded in binding workers together, urban influences – especially CIO locals, radical political parties, and black-led protest groups like the National Negro Congress – fostered new ideas about protest politics. So the literal and ideological movement of urban/rural and North/South cross-pollinated in the 1930s and 1940s more than I had expected.

HC: In your conclusion you say that “the pathogenic, divisive aspects of American life that Williams and Whitefield fought against, at great odds and with terrible risks, are still around us: inequality, poverty, and the reactionary interpretation of evangelical Christianity.” In your assessment, what are the legacies of the radical religious organizing tradition you describe? To what extent is it still alive today?

EG: One reason we wrote the book is to highlight the historic, progressive nature of Americans who had a strong religious faith. This provides a usable past to build upon for our present era when so many Americans, especially in liberal circles, ignore or condemn religious people, especially evangelical Christians, as an inherently conservative and ignorant group whose faith distracts from issues like growing economic inequality. Moreover, middle-class Americans have mocked them for holding irrational beliefs drawn from the Bible. But, drawing on this book’s protagonists as historical examples, we sometimes need pure faith to break through the hegemony of the present, of what appears as the rational status quo. Williams and Whitfield would have made the devoutly religious, whatever their political persuasion, their first priority by attempting to reorient their religious commitment to the radical gospel as their historical inheritance. This gospel, they believed, had the ideological power to break down divisions among the poor and organize them into an aggressive force in American life to expand American democracy and diminish racism, sexism, and especially economic exploitation.

JR: In the sense of explicit legacies, there isn’t much left of what Whitfield and Williams worked on in their lives. A common reaction among historians and other people we talk to about this story is surprise, perhaps mild shock, because most people have never heard about them before. That erasure was the result of several factors, including the Red Scare, but most importantly the surging power of conservative Christians in the last forty years or so. From the perspective of events in the early 1940s, however, it probably would have seemed a surprise that things have come down has they have. Take for example J. Frank Norris, one of the PIAR’s great foes in wartime Detroit. After the riot in the city in 1943, Williams effectively tarred Norris as a supporter of racial division, even violence, as the enemy of working Americans, and more generally as preacher disloyal to the nation in the fight against fascism. At the time it seemed like Williams and the PIAR might win that battle. But if you look for Norris online now, you will find that he’s treated as a respectable, even canonical, theologian in some circles. You will find books and websites devoted to this writings and his ideas. Aside from this book, you will not find similar appraisals of Williams’s work even though his vision of a working-class, Christian majority preempted the conservative Moral Majority by forty years.

If Williams and Whitfield haven’t left an explicit mark on today’s political culture, their influence can certainly be found if you know where to look, or listen. The music of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, for example, were shaped directly by Williams and the PIAR. Williams is in part responsible for the song, “We Shall Overcome,” for instance. Has that been more powerful than Norris’s legacy through Jerry Falwell?

EG: Whitfield’s efforts foreshadowed the tactics of the civil rights movement when he led the 1939 roadside demonstration in Missouri and then trained the younger generation of civil rights activists in St. Louis after the war. Both preachers, and their key allies like Harry Koger, Myles Horton, Winifred Chappell, and William DeBerry authored new methods of organizing workers that historians have come to call civil rights unionism. This form of organizing tapped a working-class culture that reached well beyond the field or factory. And the Williamses remained active into the 1960s and 1970s. He and Joyce made it their mission to open their house in Alabama to young activists for conversations about protest politics and movement organizing, past and present.

While the specific historical record of this cast of characters may have been elided, religious-based progressive activism has not disappeared. I have had the opportunity to know community organizers, unionists, and other activists through specific campaigns in Chicago over the past decade, and have learned that many of them came to these positions based on religious backgrounds, or indeed, an embrace of a gospel of the working class. These religious beliefs are not necessarily conspicuous but often sustain these activists. More explicitly, Kim Bobo and others at Interfaith Worker Justice serve as a prime example of this radical gospel’s legacy, even if their voices might get muted on the national stage in favor of mega-church ministers and televangelists.

JR: The story of Whitfield and Williams, as well as the thousands who rallied to their call, point to the more general conclusion that powerful religious denominations are most vulnerable when they no longer meet the needs of their members, and this tends to happen at a moment when those denominations are basking in worldly power and prestige, when they seem all-conquering. It happened to the Episcopalians, it happened to the Methodists, and it can happen to the Pentecostal and Baptist mega-churches. I came away from this project convinced more than ever before that religious faith is fundamentally radical in its implications for human behavior and action and that it always carries explosive potential—for good and bad, of course. Who knows what rebellions are out there simmering among believers discontented with their religious leaders? Who knows what they might be saying right now, and who knows what they might do? This book project has shown us that we need listen closely to these believers and better understand them as a potential force in American culture.

The Gospel of the Working Class: Gellman/Roll Interview, Part II

By Heath Carter

__________________

HC: You discuss in one footnote how historians of the New Deal era have “focused on the conservative or reactionary religious thought of preachers like Father Charles Coughlin or Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith.” In what ways and to what extent does the recovery of your cast of characters - the Owen Whitfields and Claude Williams of the world – revise our stories about this period?

EG: The focus on the religious right during the 1930s and 1940s has given the false impression that people during this era who prioritized religion embraced reactionary politics and fascist ideas. Uncovering this cast of progressive characters who fought for the poor and for civil rights shows how faith did not just represent a distraction or diversion from the path of New Deal liberalism or the struggles of Popular Front activists to expand America’s democratic promise. Interestingly, however, the path blazed by Whitfield, Williams and their colleagues also provides a challenging critique to many of the false assumptions New Deal liberals had in terms of class, race, and gender. For example, when Williams dealt with the so-called migrant problem of white and black southerners to Detroit during the World War II era, he analyzed it from a very different angle; Williams saw these migrants much less as the problem than the solution because he believed they had more potential to embrace a radical social gospel than their liberal counterparts who sought primarily to quell riots and preserve the racial status quo.

JR: For me, one of the most important and surprising facets of this story is that Whitfield, Williams and the people who joined them in the People’s Institute of Applied Religion and other groups were part of an extremely volatile and creative intellectual world available to common people in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly, and perhaps paradoxically to some readers, in the South and among southern migrants across America. This intellectual world had progressive, conservative and other strains, often all mixed up, and usually at the radical edge of whatever direction they tended. We already know a lot about the radical and reactionary political movements that operated in this period, but I think those stories are usually delineated in terms of ideas coming in from the outside and from the top down. I think that this book, as well as our other books, Spirit of Rebellion and Death Blow to Jim Crow, shed new light on the ways that ordinary thinkers and activists at the grassroots generated powerful new ideas and put them into action—we both build on the work of Robin Kelley and Paul Harvey, in particular, in doing this.

Telling the story of Whitfield and Williams in the same narrative seemed like a great way to expand on this historiographical project: both came from poor families in the rural South, the kind of upbringing that most histories of the period equate with despondency, backwardness, and intellectual helplessness. Yet, they went on, with the benefit of a little southern schooling, to hone a religious interpretation of America’s plight in the Great Depression that earned them the attention of the White House, the FBI, and the heads of major international labor unions. Along the way they each imbibed and reformulated ideas from Marcus Garvey’s black nationalism, Christian fundamentalism, Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee model of education, the Social Gospel, communism, inter-racialism, socialism, the ecumenical movement, and Pentecostal and holiness revival, in addition to their own respective Presbyterian and Baptist backgrounds. Crucially, they first encountered each of these various ideas and movements in the context of the rural and small-town South, not in New York or Moscow. What we tried to draw out in this book is how these ideas circulated in relative abundance among ordinary people in cotton fields, backwoods settlements, mining camps, and one-horse towns across the South, among blacks and whites who interpreted and adapted these ideas to suit their needs whatever their religious identification might be. The cast of characters in this book was a remarkable group of what we might call, after Steven Feierman, organic intellectuals, but they were not unique among their peers. I hope that conclusion opens up a number of potential avenues for further inquiry, and encourages historians to reconsider their stock assumptions about southern working-class life, social and intellectual, in this period.

HC: Elaborate on the significance of the book’s title. In what sense was this strain of Protestantism – radical especially on matters of class and race – in fact “the gospel of the working class”? In your estimation, how extensive was its reach amongst ordinary Southerners during this period?

JR: We hoped that the title would pick up on several threads in the book—threads often in tension with one another. Part of the “gospel” is the faith Whitfield and Williams had in the faith of the working-class, as well as their belief that class issues were the fundamental truths that underlay southern and American problems. Whitfield and Williams were faith-driven idealists who believed that the religious devotion of laboring whites and blacks had the power to make the kingdom of heaven on earth—to overturn racism, poverty, and gender discrimination in the United States. They saw these problems, sins really, rooted first and foremost in the South and believed that the bedrock Christian faith of ordinary southerners provided a kind of natural antidote, honed in response to these base evils for generations. Of course they accused mainstream denominational churches of facilitating these evils, mainly because these churches were vested in the established order that thrived on southern iniquities. They wanted to put that grassroots faith into action, through unions, the government, churches, or the individual preachers and prophets who they trained in the PIAR. So, in one respect, their gospel was a faith in class-based politics leavened with what they considered a true Christian conviction. The title also plays on the way Whitfield and Williams preached this “gospel” to the working classes in an effort to get them to realize their moral power, even duty, in an immoral world. They wanted to convert people to their version of the good news. In both senses of the title, this is the “gospel of the working class” from the perspective of the two preachers, and it is not hard to imagine it led to all sorts of interesting twists and turns, innovations and errors, but always propelled by an idealistic faith. That both men risked their lives, their livelihoods, and the well being of their families during several decades of service to that faith gives some indication of the strength of their idealism.

That is not to say that the “gospel of the working class” was solely in the heads of Whitfield and Williams. Thousands of white and black southerners (and other Americans) shared their gospel in this period. Both preachers were from the working class themselves and came to this religious interpretation through many years of grueling spiritual searching for some way to reconcile what they considered to be God’s promise to the righteous with the brutal living and working conditions that crushed their neighbors, their families, and even themselves. That search took them into domestic mission work and a range of political alternatives, all aimed at making their faith powerful and consequential in their lives and the lives of others. I think this aspect of the story points to the importance of biography as a way of mapping this religious search. Christians across the South were on the same quest in these years, looking for grace and salvation in a range of places that included the various political groups that Whitfield and Williams found, as well as Pentecostal and holiness churches, before religiously committed working people joined groups like the Share Croppers’ Union, the STFU, or the CIO. Of course, some poor people found their answers in reactionary groups. For Whitfield and Williams this spiritual search led them to create the PIAR to work independently of all other organizations and to empower a roving band of prophets to attempt to channel the faith of working people into collective action--from cotton fields to cities like Memphis, Winston-Salem, Chicago, and, most famously, Detroit.

In terms of their reception, it is remarkable to me that Whitfield and Williams proved so popular for so long—neither ever had much money or much outside support, but neither of them ever failed to excite people wherever they went. People in the tens of thousands listened to them and acted based on what they said and this more than anything demonstrates for me the extent to which their preaching did tap into something real, whether you call it the gospel of the working class or not. Poor people heard the ring of truth in what these two preachers said, often going against their own upbringing, against the law, against the teaching of their regular church homes, against the secular leaders of their unions, and sometimes against plain good sense to follow Whitfield and Williams. Popular support sustained them, and worried the authorities, often the police, church leaders, or their own superiors in labor unions, all at the same time. They definitely had something that poor people wanted to hear.

EG: One surprise in conducting the research on this book for me was how deeply American workers in the era of the Depression and war felt their religious faith. Many union leaders in the narrative failed to appreciate this faith, but at the grassroots, workers often oriented themselves through their relationship to God. Beginning in the Great Depression, Williams, Whitfield and a host of other working-class preachers came to comprehend and spread a gospel of the working class defined by a focus on healing the earth, showing faith through productive work, and engaging in action when access to work and autonomy for their families disappeared. In so doing, they joined with other workers in a faith that crossed racial, geographic, and gender lines. But that does not imply this gospel was the only working-class one. The religious activists in this book sought to convert working-class people who believed in a faith that oriented them to other-worldly concerns or, in the case of many radical political and union leaders, a lack of faith because they saw it as a diversion from political activism. Second, these preachers came to distrust the institutional church and middle class religious figures that they saw as straying from the work of Jesus as he had lived on earth. Williams and Whitfield believed that working with the poor always came before your church’s financial standing or reputation. This explains why their message reached so many of the disinherited and poor people during the 1930s and 1940s, but also why they eventually had to start their own organization—the People’s Institute of Applied Religion--because the labor movement, political parties, and other civic and civil rights groups came in conflict with their tendency to prioritize a larger people’s religious movement over short term institutional objectives.

HC: Your protagonists talk about the institutional churches in the South as being aligned with “the owning class” and “the bosses.” To what extent did this rhetoric map on to reality in your period? If in fact the region’s religious institutions were in cahoots with capital, how did they manage to maintain such a strong foothold amongst the people?

EG: They came to believe that the institutional church, especially its mainstream denominations, had become morally bankrupt. There’s a great moment in the book where Williams goes to Harry Fosdick’s massive Riverside Church in New York City. Williams, as a young minister, had been profoundly influenced by Fosdick’s writings about how to make Christianity more accessible to modern life. But having been radicalized by his activism in the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and other southern protests by the mid-1930s, Williams rebuked what he heard in Fosdick’s church. He condemned the sermon as a liberal pat on the back to parishioners rather than a call for action against the alarming spread of fascism, in the South as much as the rest of the world. As Whitfield comments as a result of his conversion, the true gospel does not send you home happy or content, it sends you home fighting mad.

That said, their readiness to reject the institutional church, especially after the mid-1930s, sometimes hindered their work. In Detroit, for example, one of their allies, Henry D. Jones, got upset at Williams’s radicalism, not for its content, but for his lack of political tact. Just when the PIAR was expanding in the Motor City on the basis of support and alliances with institutional churches and leading ministers, Williams condemned liberals in the church rather than attempting to foster these alliances and slowly bring them along to his more radical mission. Ultimately this anti-institutional stance led to a larger question: how can any group of people build and sustain a movement without building an organization? The leaders of the PIAR confronted this problem in the 1940s and I would say it’s one of the reasons they failed to spread their message farther than they did, or establish it with any permanence in the longer term. If you always privilege action over organizing for the future, you make your movement institutionally unstable. Beginning in the late 1940s, political attacks during the Red Scare period made the PIAR a quick casualty because its leaders had established few institutional resources to fight back. As an independent entity that wasn’t really much of an organized entity, it also proved too easy for allies to abandon when the political winds turned.

JR: In some ways the rhetoric mapped quite closely to the reality of the period. Williams first went to Detroit at the behest of the Presbyterian Church, which wanted him to reach out to southern migrants to the city before they fell under the sway of conservative, right-wing preachers like Gerald L. K. Smith and J. Frank Norris, who started what became the World Baptist Fellowship and was very influential on people like John Birch and Jerry Falwell. In Detroit Williams and the PIAR were battling head-to-head with arch ideological foes, all of them on both sides claiming to be the true Christians. More broadly, both Whitfield and Williams considered the institutional church to be too comfortable with worldly power, whether money, property or prestige. For them, the word of God itself was liberating and anything that stood in the way of the application of the word was obstructing the will of God. It did not matter if it was a preacher or a church polity, it had to be defied. That’s one reason they always gravitated toward Pentecostal, holiness and other breakaway churches. These rebellious groups also despised the power of institutional churches (even though some were busy building their own institutions) because they inhibited the ability of ordinary believers to connect directly with the divine. Whitfield and Williams both came of age alongside this great early twentieth century revolt in American Christianity and both were shaped by it intellectually. It was natural for them to turn to these sets of believers later in their career.

The Gospel of the Working Class: An Interview with Erik Gellman and Jarod Roll, Part I

By Heath Carter



Today I'm posting the first of three installments of an interview with Erik Gellman and Jarod Roll regarding their new book, The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor's Southern Prophets in New Deal America. Parts two and three will follow tomorrow and Friday, respectively.



Last week Paul Harvey posted some of his thoughts on the book. If his high praise wasn't enough to convince you to pick up your own copy, then maybe Pete Seeger's endorsement will do the trick: "This is the story of heroic people, black and white, who tried to democratize the southeastern states of the USA in the years before Dr. King and the Warren Court." Here's more acclaim from the book's U. of Illinois press site:



"A must read for today: two activists, one black, one white, organize America's laboring poor through a powerful social gospel to confront racism and economic injustice in the Great Depression and World War II era."--Reverend Calvin S. Morris, Executive Director, Community Renewal Society



"This outstanding and impressively researched study reveals the tremendous significance of Claude Williams and Owen Whitfield, two major figures in the efforts to organize southern black and white workers. Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll also show the significance of religion in southern working class history. There have been other studies of various religious figures who worked for social justice in the South during this era, but this is the finest one that I have read."--Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, author of American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta



"A remarkable, nuanced account. Gellman and Roll have accessed the lives and learning of these two activists, combining excellent writing and analysis to bring clarity and inspiration to the story. Rarely do historians write with such insight and passion. This is an exciting text for anyone interested in labor, southern, and civil rights history. It ties things together in a way that no other book has done yet."--Michael K. Honey, author of Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers and Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign



Now, without further delay, on to the interview.

_____________________________

HC: In the acknowledgements you indicate that the book represents “truly a fifty-fifty collaboration.” How did you go about this collaboration? Also, can you shed some light on the nature of your “not infrequent debates over interpretation”?

JR: We began our collaboration as graduate students with a project that resulted in an article on Owen Whitfield in the Journal of Southern History. We had both encountered the work and career of Whitfield in the course of our research on our respective dissertations and thought that we could do something new and important by joining forces. That project proved rewarding, both in terms of our ability to work together and the way the resulting article spoke to a range of historiographical issues. But I think that we both felt that we had to leave so much important research on the cutting-room floor to get the manuscript into the shape of an article that an expanded version of the project seemed like a logical next step. We were very confident in the material, especially since the Whitfield article had received an enthusiastic response just as we were both trying to finish our dissertations, but also felt that the story could do even more in terms of its scholarly and popular impact if we included the career of Claude Williams in the narrative. In the Whitfield article we had worked to craft a story that broke through the scholarly partitions that we felt kept various subfields in modern American history, such as religion, labor, faith, class, rural and urban, distinct and separate in ways that did not reflect the actual history of people like Whitfield. By looking at Whitfield and Williams in tandem we thought we could go further and combine fundamental stories of race and region that are often told separately—white or black, North or South--into a single historical narrative alongside our earlier focus on labor and religion in rural and urban areas. After a couple of years in which we both finished our dissertations and settled into jobs, we decided to try to collaborate on this more ambitious book project, even though neither of us was sure of what a co-authored, joint biography might look like as a historical narrative.

EG: It certainly helped in framing this project that we were both also working at the same time on revising our dissertations into books. Jarod had a vast understanding of the interplay between work and faith in the rural world inhabited by Williams and Whitfield in the early twentieth century, since he was completing what became his award-winning book, Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South. Meanwhile, I was finishing a reappraisal of urban protest politics in the 1930s and 1940s, the topic of my forthcoming book on the National Negro Congress, Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights. We decided early on that we wanted as much of the book as possible to truly combine our accounts of the lives of Whitfield and Williams, rather than alternate chapters. In the first chapter, we treat their early lives from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s as separate narratives to parallel the Jim Crow society that kept them apart, and the chapters thereafter present a unified chronological account that focuses mostly on their collaboration in the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union in the 1930s and in the CIO in the 1940s, particularly their joint effort in the People’s Institute of Applied Religion.

When it came time to write, we divided sections of the chapters according to our research strengths, but by the time we got through passing drafts back and forth, I could no longer discern who wrote what first. Although we did not sit down side-by-side to write it, by the end we had both worked extensively with every line in the book. In practice this meant that we each had the power to cut or rework what the other had written all the way through. Nothing was really off-limits, which required trust to allow for blunt criticism and substantial revision.

As an exception to this process, we did sit down at the very end to finish key parts together. During a final research trip to the Reuther archives at Wayne State University in Detroit, we looked at a few more sources and checked references by day and drafted pieces of the introduction at night in a motel in nearby Dearborn. And on the trip from Detroit back to Chicago, we came up with a few more key points, which Jarod fortunately was able to draft on his laptop while I drove the car.

JR: In terms of our debates over interpretation, I think that’s been one of the most rewarding aspects of this collaboration. When confronted with a vast array of primary sources, the historian often analyzes them not in dialogue with others but in his or her own mind. By making this isolated process into an open, shared one, we forced ourselves to be sharper in the ways we read materials. When I made the case for a particular reading of a historical moment or source, I had to articulate a cogent argument to convince Erik and vice versa. To settle most of our debates we relied in the end on the expertise we each brought to the project, getting back to the importance of trust that Erik mentioned. Making sure that our various interpretations added up to a coherent analysis was harder to do and took several rounds of drafting and revision to get right.

Equally important, I think, was the way we reminded each other throughout to not make the book overly academic, which really meant preventing one another from excessively grinding our favorite historiographical axes. We tried to write a book that an undergraduate student can come away from with a more complex understanding of religious faith and protest politics in Great Depression and World War II-era America, and the ways that story fits into a longer historical trajectory from Reconstruction to the modern Civil Rights Movement.

HC: In the introduction you say, “Historians of labor have traditionally seen religion, and especially religious discontent, as a manifestation of some more tangible set of class relationships.” In contrast, you want to highlight “the dynamic power and centrality of religious ideas in social and political movements.” What direction do you see the field moving on this front? To what extent has your work as well as that of other scholars – including, for example, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Ken Fones-Wolf, and Alison Greene – persuaded labor and working-class historians that religion is more than epiphenomenal?

EG: I think we are in a fruitful period of revisionist scholarship when it comes to religious ideology in American history. Over the past two decades, many scholars undertook studies of religion to understand how religious evangelicals have so effectively organized since the 1970s to become one of the most prominent conservative political forces in America. While this work proved essential to understanding late twentieth century American history, it elided the importance of faith in many progressive social movements in the United States, especially during the New Deal and World War II-era where the scholarship privileged class politics, unionism, and political sectarianism as ideologies divorced from religious faith. Even historians of civil rights of the 1960s, who mention this earlier period and the rural church as being important to the black freedom struggle, do so in a sentence or paragraph in a larger study about the black middle-class and urban church as the religious engine of the movement.

JR: There is a vibrant group of scholars working on the relationship between labor and religion, including Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Ken Fones-Wolf, Richard Callahan, John Hayes, Janine Giordano Drake, Joe Creech, Alison Collis Greene, as well as our esteemed interviewer, Heath Carter, that is producing very exciting ground-breaking work, some of it published recently, some of it on the way. This group actually represents two different, independent historiographical movements approaching similar questions from very different perspectives. In the first group are historians of American religion who are interested broadly in questions of poverty and working-class faith, as well as the role of working-class faith in labor organizations. In the most general sense, scholars like Creech, Hayes, Greene, and Carter are critical of American religious historiography for paying too little attention to the religion of poor people, both in and out of denominational churches. Their research is concerned first and foremost with church communities, denominational bodies, and debates about theological ideas among and between clerics and the laity in relation to questions of class, poverty, and the politics thereof.

The work of this group of scholars is essential to the efforts of the second group in this movement, historians of labor trying to emphasize the religious aspects of working-class politics and action. This group is concerned primarily with historiographical questions surrounding the fates of labor unions and movements, popular organizing traditions, and recovering working-class intellectual worlds. I think that those of us, including me and Erik, in this group probably have the harder hill to climb in terms of shifting the field overall because many labor historians are, usually for ideological reasons, deeply suspicious if not outright hostile to religion and faith as concepts. A lot of this has to do with recent politics, particularly the role of evangelical Christians in conservative movements: religion, the dismissal goes, is the terrain of the Right and a distraction from more important material concerns. That interpretation is obviously too simplistic and too neatly tailored to recent political developments to be the last word. But the work of correcting this tendency in the field has only begun.

What we have tried to do in this book is show how Whitfield, Williams, and their peers found in their Christian faith a powerful means to address the most fundamental American problems of their time: poverty and racism. That they sought to put their faith into action through labor unions and other organizations associated with the political Left is an important part of the story, but it is not the only important part. We did not intend this book to challenge the dictum that evangelical Christianity is conservative by arguing the opposite, that it is progressive. I think we both agree that it is neither conservative nor progressive, politically speaking. What we want to show, rather, is that religious faith was central to the lives of ordinary Americans in this period, that religious belief provided a common ground where men and women, African American and white, rural or urban, could identify with one another in something like common cause. Most of all, we hope the book shows how rich religion is as intellectual history, particular as a realm in which working-class people have accessed, created and developed powerful new ideas that changed the way they lived and acted in the world. The story of Whitfield and Williams is fundamentally about the tremendous power of faith above and beyond institutional church homes. Their faith led them to challenge church authorities (Williams was a Cumberland Presbyterian, Whitfield a Baptist), work together in defiance of the Jim Crow color line, and risk their own lives and the welfare of their families to make the world a little more agreeable to God. In short, we take religious ideas seriously and hope that more of our colleagues in the field of labor history do the same. We don’t think you can credibly emphasize working-class agency and at the same time dismiss the beliefs and faiths of the working class as epiphenomena. It can’t be both ways.

Blessed with a Dark Turn of Mind: Gillian Welch's Spiritual Strivings

Paul Harvey

A few days ago I blogged a bit about Reinhold

Niebuhr and Gillian Welch, an unlikely but (in my view) apt combination of theologian and performing artist. In this short essay for Religion Dispatches, I develop my thoughts about her newest recording (and some of her previous recordings) at greater length, focusing especially on her musical relationship to the "hard religion" of the rural South whose music she recreates, rejuvenates, and reinterprets. We here at the blog await word from her publicist about the possibility of an email interview, but suffice to say if that happens (big if there) it will be awesome!!!! Scroll down a bit for a live performance of one of the tunes from the record.

Update! Alec Wilkinson for the New Yorker makes many similar points about the record, in this piece just out for the magazine. Cool, but I wrote mine early last week, so feeling ahead of the curve, even if I do live in a flyover state and famously conservative city!

A brief excerpt from the piece, and then follow the rest at the link:

“It is the best kind of record: one that lures you in and soothes you with harmonies and banjo, only to leave you wondering what the hell just happened.”
—Kitty Empire, review of The Harrow & the Harvest in The Observer, June 26, 2011

That’s a good question to ask of someone who sings of spending seven years with her companion

on the burning shore, with Gatling guns and paint,
working the lowlands door to door, like a Latter-day Saint.

And that’s before she’s turned out at the top of the stairs, by someone who took all the glory,that you just couldn’t share. Welch and her partner David Rawlings sing in haunting union:

I’ve never been so disabused, never been so mad
I’ve never been served anything that tasted so bad.

Listening to this song, “The Way It Will Be,” I too don’t know what the hell just happened, but it’s impossible not to complete the story, to fill in those gaps. We’ve all eaten that bitterness at some point. And that urge to figure out the details in the mysteriously unsettling story comes wrapped here in religiously-tinged narratives and imagery that historically have received their richest expression in the musical culture of the American South.

Welch’s Southern characters, though, emerge not from some imaginary version of God, country, and family, but from the spiritual strivings of folk who have seen plenty of hard times.

Continue . . . .

Here's a clip from one tune, "The Way It Goes," performed recently:

Call for Proposals, SHA 2012, Mobile, AL

Randall Stephens

Just received some more directions from Marjorie Spruill and Don Doyle on the 2012 SHA conference. They encourage those of us on the program committee to "help create a rich and broad program for 2012 by soliciting exciting proposals particularly in your field." My field, being your field, dear reader, so let's get at it!

Here's the general note about the Mobile conference:

The Program Committee for 2012 invites proposals on all topics related to the history of the American South from its pre-colonial era to today. In addition, for the 2012 meeting in Mobile, it extends a special welcome to proposals relating to:

~ Mobile and the Gulf South

~ International, transnational, or comparative approaches

~ 2012 as an anniversary of major historical events, publications, etc.

Any religious history anniversaries of note? How about the activities of Gulf South missionaries in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era? Religious responses to natural disasters? Religion and labor radicalism? Big Oil and the churches? . . .

Ain't No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Claude Ely

Paul Harvey

Here's a great radio story, courtesy of Radio Diaries and NPR, about the Rev. Claude Ely, Holiness/Pentecostal exhorter and singer from Kentucky and author of the classic "Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down." Johnny Cash's recording of the song just before he died, and a huge internet mashup done to that recording, was the subject of a post of mine some time ago. A brief excerpt from the transcript of the radio show:

People would show up to revivals because they had heard about this country singer who sang like a black man. Brother Claude Ely would thrash his guitar, shake and gyrate from one part of the stage to the other. Young men would run up to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

Gladys Presley, Elvis' mother, was a fan of Brother Claude Ely's ministry, and some people remember Gladys and Elvis getting blessed at Brother Claude Ely tent revivals while Brother Claude Ely laid hands on them and prayed for them.

This story comes from the efforts of Macel Ely, Brother Claude's nephew, who encountered his uncle's music while traveling in Europe, and wondered how it found its way there. Evidently he is producing a full-length documentary on the subject. You can hear Ely's rendition of his song along with some photos here, and a CD compilation of Claude can be found here.

A final note: somehow those who prattle on about NPR's "liberal bias" somehow never get around to talking about stories like these, which took up most of the last segment of yesterday's show from that dreaded bastion of left-wing propaganda, All Things Considered -- never mind all the locally produced reporting such as the programs about Colorado which I have written about here, and the programs about the Ozarks which John Schmalzbauer has written about for Immanent Frame here.

Here's some more information on Macel Ely's book which came from his efforts to find out about his uncle's widespread influence, Ain't No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Brother Claude Ely (published by the wonderful Atlanta outfit Dust-to-Digital, compiler and publisher of the peerless six-CD set Goodbye, Babylon, and many other musical classics).

Ain’t No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Brother Claude Ely is written as an oral, biographical history taken from the recorded interviews of more than 1,000 people in the Appalachian Mountains who knew Brother Claude Ely. Coined as the King Recording Label’s “Gospel Ranger,” Brother Claude Ely was well-known and loved by many in the earlier part of the 20th century as both a religious singer-songwriter and a Pentecostal-Holiness preacher. Few people, however, knew the personal details of his childhood, military service, and years of hard work in the coal fields of southwestern Virginia.

Now, decades after his legendary death, many fans still seem mesmerized and touched by this humble man’s quick wit and sincere desire to share the Gospel’s “Good News” with everyone who would listen to his message of hope and love. Having received popularity for his song, “There Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down,” Brother Claude Ely passed along a musical and spiritual influence which can still be heard today like a mountain echo in those long, winding hollows and impoverished coal fields. Hollywood and the “King of Rock and Roll” also later acknowledged their admiration for and fascination with the late Brother Claude Ely. This book chronicles the life of one man who made an eternal impact on thousands of Appalachian dwellers. His simple sermons and folkloric songs are still providing assurance, hope, and faith to many mountain people

2012 Southern Historical Association Meeting

Randall Stephens

I'm serving on the program committee for the Southern Historical Association meeting, Mobile, Alabama, November 1-4, 2012. Paul tells me this will involve looking over an avalanche of proposals in a sealed bunker ten miles under the 2011 conference hotel. But he says it is fun, and I believe him. I'll do my utmost to get some good religion panels into the mix.

Here's the CFP:

SHA 2012, Mobile, Alabama:

The Program Committee invites proposals on all topics related to the history of the American South from its pre-colonial era to today. In addition, for the 2012 meeting in Mobile it extends a special welcome to proposals relating to:

* Mobile and the Gulf South
* International, transnational, or comparative approaches
* 2012 as an anniversary of major historical events, publications, etc.

The Program Committee accepts proposals for single papers but encourages session proposals that include two or three papers. Individuals interested in using the SHA website to organize a session with complementary papers may send an e-mail to Sheree Dendy with their name, e-mail address, and proposed paper topic. She will post this information on the SHA website, which others seeking compatible co-panelists may consult. Click here to view current postings of those seeking related proposals.

According to SHA policy, no one who appeared on the previous two programs, those at Charlotte and Baltimore, can be part of the program in Mobile.

Those submitting proposals should include suggestions of people who would be appropriate as commentators/chairs but not issue invitations. The Program Committee will select and invite a chair and usually two commentators. Note: this policy is new for the 2012 program.

No two people from the same institution can be on the same session.

See instructions for submitting proposals online, click here.

The deadline for proposals for the 2012 program is September 1, 2011.

Proposals in Latin American and Caribbean should be submitted to the section sub- committees. Click here.

2012 Program Committee Co-Chairs: Don Doyle and Marjorie Spruill University of South Carolina

Musical Monday: Larry Norman and Repurposing the Gospel Aura

Paul Harvey

A couple of musical posts to liven up your Monday. First, blog friend David Stowe, author of the very-soon-to-forthcome No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (which we blogged about a few weeks ago), has a guest post at the UNC Press blog based on a conversation in 2007 with Christian rock pioneer Larry Norman, shortly before he (Norman, that is) passed. The stories, full of musical celebrities, are fun. And he continues:

Were all these stories credible? Who knows. He told me he’d chatted in an airport lounge with a woman in a beautiful jacket who claimed that her husband was Bob Dylan. Andraé Crouch, who happened to be there with Norman, confirmed the woman’s story. Norman confirmed something that my ears had told me: that Dylan’s Grammy-winning single “Gotta Serve Somebody” was closely modeled on Norman’s song “Righteous Rocker,” released several years earlier.

This is a fun read, highly recommended.

As is Douglas Harrison, Repurposing the Gospel Aura, in today's Religion Dispatches, which takes the use of a gospel choir as a backdrop to Eminem's much-commented-upon Chrysler/Detroit commercial as a way of reflecting on how and why this music invites audiences "to imagine themselves as part of a colorblind fellowship of humanity bound together by the soulful sound of a black gospel choir." Harrison reflects on what is gained, and what is lost/missing, in that process. Black gospel is a "universal language of inspiration and transcendence that cuts across race, class, and history," but in the process, "the very real racial tension surrounding the struggle for equality of opportunity in America isn’t so much resolved or reconciled or even recognized. It is simply ignored in these digestible little pageants of musical and psychosocial harmony."

Thinking of this post at Religion Dispatches, it's a good time to congratulate our blog contributor Gerardo Marti, who has just finished his book manuscript, for Oxford, on a very similar theme: Worship Across the Racial Divide: Notions of Race and Religious Practice in Multiracial Churches, coming out with Oxford next year. Gerardo talks about how African American music comes to stand for authenticity in the churches he studies. And he talks about much else besides -- maybe we can entice him to do a little post here in celebration of mailing off the manuscript, telling us about his work a bit more? Let's hear it, ya'll.

Yes, Researchers Do Know Something About Teaching

Art Remillard

On the final day of FSU’s Graduate Symposium, I had the pleasure of joining Kelly Baker, Betsy Barre, Howell Williams, and Joseph Williams to talk about, "Life after Graduate School." A recurring theme was the difference between teaching and research schools. We outlined strategies for interviewing at such schools, and gave insights on what daily life is like as a teacher or researcher. We also emphasized that, despite outward appearances, folks at teaching schools take research seriously, and folks at research schools take teaching seriously. This point--that researchers strive to excel in the classroom--could use some publicity. Many of the best professors I've known are also productive scholars. They have an infectious enthusiasm about their subject, and give as much thought to their course designs as they do to any article or book. They are also creative, always looking for something new to enliven the classroom. Take our own Paul Harvey, for example. UCCS's Teaching and Learning Center featured Paul and his use of blogs in undergraduate courses. He also elaborated on his jazz-inspired teaching philosophy. No "teacher-centered" or "student-centered" approach for the good Professor Harvey.

I focus on a theme-and-improvisation model, that allows for the discipline and intellectual rigor of a theme while also encouraging soloing and improvisation. I find this model best fits the notion of learning as an active and dynamic process, that occurs for different students on varying levels. I have also found it works to make students feel they have a voice and that their participation is valued and drawn upon in course preparation, even while assuring them that discipline and intellectual rigor have not been sacrificed.

Blogging, jazz, intellectual rigor--very nice. How about some one-upmanship from Mike Pasquier, who has been collaborating with LSU’s Coastal Sustainability Studio to have his students conduct oral histories in Bayou Lafourche. Take a minute and listen to this podcast where Mike and his students discuss the project. The description:

Today’s show is an interview with one of the Center’s partners, Dr. Mike Pasquier, a professor here at LSU in the Religious Studies Department. Dr. Pasquier is working with the Center to establish the Bayou Lafourche Oral History Project. He and his students collected oral histories to gain a better understanding of the role of religion in everyday life among Bayou Lafourche residents. He’s also partnering with the Coastal Sustainability Studio here at LSU, and is using this material to garner a better understanding of how south Louisiana culture is being affected by wetland loss. He teaches courses in U.S. religious history, Christianity, and world religions and his research focuses on the history of Roman Catholicism in the American South, Catholic devotional culture, and religion in colonial Louisiana.

In this episode, the director will speak with him about his ongoing project in Bayou Lafourche, how he uses oral history in the college classroom, and how this research will be useful to a larger, interdisciplinary study assessing the impact of land loss on residents of the area. We’ll get to hear some clips from interviews recorded by some of his students with Bayou Lafourche residents. So join us today as we hear about men murmuring the rosary during Hurricane Betsy, about school children being punished for speaking French on state property, and about how the land and waters where people fish, work, and live is disappearing before our eyes.

The Mormon Menace

John Turner

Last fall, Ed Blum brought Patrick Mason's Journal of Southern History article on southern anti-polygamy campaigns to our attention. Those appetites whetted by Mason's article can now satiate themselves with his full-length treatment of anti-Mormonism in the late-nineteenth-century American South. [Note: Patrick is a former graduate school classmate of mine who helped kindle my interest in things Mormon, so I make no pretense at detachment in the below].

The Mormon Menace (released imminently by Oxford University Press) tells a largely unknown and remarkable story. Patrick's book is not a history of the Latter-day Saints in the South, but an analysis of southern anti-Mormonism. He might have subtitled the book Awash in a Sea of Baptist Haters but chose to not be so impolitic. At first glance, one might object that there were not all that many Mormons (or Mormon missionaries, for that matter) in the American South at this time. However, southerners were incredibly alarmed about the threat Mormon polygamy posed to innocent white women allegedly at great risk of being seduced by traveling elders. Patrick notes that vigilante attacks against Mormons "far exceeded the combined number of attacks against all other religious outsiders in the South, including Jews and Catholics, during this time period." Following the lead of R. Laurence Moore, Patrick suggests one can learn a great deal about the religious "center" of a society by examining the experience of the religiously marginalized.

One great strength of the Mormon Menace is its intelligent engagement with a variety of literatures. Rereading the introduction, I found insights about American vigilantism, southern politics, race, and religious difference. Patrick argues that "anti-Mormonism provided one set of bonds that helped reforge national unity after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and gave southerners common cause with northern reformers and politicians who had been their bitter enemies only a few years earlier." In short, this is first and foremost a book for historians of the American South, not a narrow offering for historians of Mormonism. I would recommend it as absolutely essential reading for anyone studying the place of religious minorities in the South or the history of American vigilantism.

A final note. Well-written and intelligently edited books are always a greater pleasure to read, even for historians. Patrick's book excels in this respect. The narrative is strong, and some of the illustrations are downright shocking (turn to pp. 138-39).

In the late 1800s, southerners were mostly unique in employing violence to ward off the "Mormon menace." Patrick's book prompted me to think about the contemporary nature of anti-Mormonism in the United States, especially in the South. LDS adherents remain a small minority in Dixie (the "real" Dixie, not southern Utah), comprising less than one percent of the population in all states of the former Confederacy save Virginia and Texas. I occasionally hear people talk about LDS growth in this region of the country but do not know whether it's true. Also, I often ask Latter-day Saints about their missionary experiences. Since Mormon missionaries are quite inured to rejection and unfriendly responses, I rarely hear complaints about anti-Mormon attitudes. The exception has been among former missionaries who served in the Deep South. Perhaps southern evangelicals retain their long-standing animus against Mormons, fortunately without the violence documented in The Mormon Menace. I also note a fair amount of theological anti-Mormonism (or simply generic anti-Mormonism, based on not very much) among my students. Since we began our annual summer pilgrimages to Zion, several well-meaning acquaintances in southern Alabama have expressed spiritual concern on our behalf, whereas our New England friends mostly worry about our access to coffee.