Historical Humor

Humor can be extremely revealing. It can give voice to otherwise inexpressible thoughts and it can be used as a tool to bond the humorist and the (humoree?). For these reasons, expressions of humor can be a valuable resource for historians eager to gauge the opinions and perspectives of a particular person, place or time. It can also give insights into fleeting historical contexts.

I recently stumbled across just such a piece of historical humor that hits upon the most sensitive chapter in Southern history. Despite its purely benign intention, it is a joke that would never be made today. In fact it's so sensitive that I've been nervous about sharing it for the past couple of weeks. My hope, however, is that I can give enough context to make any reader understand why it is important to expose and study this without casting any scorn on the people and institutions involved. Here's what I found:

My first reaction after seeing this in the clubs section of the 1900 Converse College yearbook was a surprised expletive or two. Converse had a chapter of the KKK active on campus?! And they were proud enough to show it off (names included) in the yearbook?! But after the shock faded, it became clear that a few of my assumptions were wrong. Taking a closer look at the rhyme, I saw that the organization's mission was to "torment the faculty." Also, by including the names of the members, it clearly wasn't a secret society. Plus, the photo is a hokey, staged depiction of a night-time raid, complete with a lantern and an over-abundance of firearms. And then of course, I remembered that the KKK wasn't exactly a women's institution.

So this was a joke: a pretend student club to terrorize college professors. It would be funny without the awful, heavy, blood-soaked baggage. But what exactly is that baggage and what changed to make this so terribly distasteful?

The answer lies in the precise period in which this joke was made. It also helps to have some background on the history of the KKK. The oversimplified (and still controversial) story is that the KKK had two periods of activity and that its mission shifted between those two periods. It was born in late 1865 just as the South entered Reconstruction as a reaction to perceived wrongs committed on the Old South ruling classes by newly emancipated slaves, carpetbaggers, and unsympathetic Southerners. The corruption and mistakes of Reconstruction-era politics are well documented, and the KKK was widespread among otherwise benign Southerners because it was a counterbalance to other wrongs. Two wrongs don't make a right, but with any luck they can make a tense standstill, and it was a long time before violence stopped begetting violence. But by the 1880s, with the end of Reconstruction coming in 1876, the KKK had lost its need for existence. By 1900, it was a foggy memory. Enough time had passed to make it an acceptable joke. It reminds me of the South Park episode that reasons that 20 years is the amount of time that has to pass before a serious issue can become a joke.

The reason that this joke can't work now, though, is primarily because of the resurgence of the KKK in the 1920s. While the previous incarnation stressed the wrongs of a corrupt political structure, this newer version was more explicitly white supremacist and xenophobic. Hatred towards various ethnicities, non-Protestant religions, and Communism became a key point of the revised rhetoric. As the decades passed, it was also much more of a fringe organization, while the earlier version had more widespread sympathy.

With this context it becomes easier to understand how a group of teenage college girls could laughingly violate what has become one of the strongest American taboos. 1900 was a window in time when the KKK didn't exist and reviving its memory could be funny to a group of wealthy white girls. It was also over half a century before the Civil Rights Era would begin to push out the antebellum ideology that assumed white superiority.

Only true history dorks need read further.

I want to issue a disclaimer that I'm aware of some of the racist agendas that have been put forth using this "Dunning School" interpretation of Reconstruction as a period of corruption and mismanagement. Here's my view: Despite the best intentions and limited successes of some who were involved in Reconstruction politics, post-war politics anywhere are bound to be messy, particularly when a large percentage of the electorate is so new to the political process. Rational evaluation, that cornerstone of the democratic process, is nearly impossible for anyone in such a situation, especially when there are so many forces desperate for a piece of the pie in a war-torn state of economic collapse and near anarchy. In such a state, corruption and mismanagement seem almost inevitable.

Spartanburg's Nightmare Days

Rather than rattle off the story of a murder or haunting, my post this month has more to do with the ghost of a vision, one that haunts a lot of the leadership in Spartanburg. With municipal elections less than a week away, this ghost was suddenly resurrected about a week ago by one of the mayoral candidates.

The ghost I'm referring to is one of the darkest chapters in downtown's history: the period from the 1960s through the 1990s. This was when downtown was depopulated and crime-ridden and city leaders tried one scheme after another to revitalize our crumbling town. Typical of most small American cities, suburbs and the white flight trend that populated them sapped money and interest from downtown. This was compounded by the slow decline of the textile industry that had buoyed up a lot of the business in the city. Top it off with a series of misguided planning errors and downtown Spartanburg had four decades of loss and stagnation.

One of the earliest attempts to get people back downtown was to widen and expand the roadways. I guess the logic was that a smoother traffic flow would get people circulating and take them to their destinations downtown faster.
It didn't work. Instead, we still have buildings with their sides and fronts lobbed off. Downtown became little more than a speed bump between the east and west sides.

Perhaps the second major attempts were the well-documented Urban Renewal projects on the southside and northside. The goal was to move impoverished families out of the sub-standard housing and into more modern (and more compact) housing. Vast, depopulated boulevards (East Daniel Morgan and Hudson Barksdale) were created in their wake. Needless to say, all it did was further embitter the African-American community and wipe out small businesses.

The best known attempt was the Main Street Mall, which closed vehicular traffic to East Main Street between Converse Street and Church Street from 1974 to 1989. This project was modeled after similar pedestrian malls in other cities and was believed to be the best way to compete with the suburban shopping malls that themselves mimicked downtown storefronts. There was great hope for this million-dollar project, but as in other cities, the project failed and downtown continued on its downward spiral.

Another aborted plan was the Spartan Centre project, which sought to reconfigure Morgan Square and replace the 19th century storefronts that lined the square with an enormous mid-1970s indoor marketplace. This project lost momentum quickly, but not before the north side of the square was leveled, including Spartanburg's first skyscraper, the 1912 Andrews Building. The resulting lot (called the Opportunity Block) was vacant from 1977 until 2003, when the Extended Stay headquarters was constructed. This project even had fatalities. Five people died during the unexpected collapse of the Andrews Building during its demolition.

The late 1980s also produced another plan to reconfigure the square and build a hotel in the vacant Opportunity Block. This plan also recommended the removal of the Main Street Mall, the only part of the plan actually implemented.

It's difficult to put a finger on how things began to turn around. But beginning in the 1990s, my sense is that people began to take a little more pride in downtown. It may have been the 1990 construction of the Spartan Foods Tower (now most often known as the Denny's Building). Another possibility could be that the events held downtown started bringing return visitors who took notice of the urban landscape. The 1997 construction of the new Spartanburg County Public Library headquarters certainly had a huge impact. Perhaps the 1999 historic facade easement program, which led to the restoration of several downtown storefronts, encouraged people to notice the decorative brick building facades. The construction of the Extended Stay Headquarters and the Advance America Building brought white collar workers to downtown every day, as did the QS1 Building. Beginning in 2005, Hub-Bub provided consistent nightlife and cultural options and gave downtown a boost of creative momentum leading up to the 2007 completion of the Chapman Cultural Center.

2005 was also the year that approximately 2 acres of sterile blacktop was unearthed and replaced with a verdant community gathering spot that has hosted Wednesday Farmer's Markets, Jazz on the Square, homecoming celebrations, outsider art shows, community pep rallies, and scores of other events. Our historic city center is now the ultimate spot of pride, and our downtown has begun to flourish around it.

Thinking that our downtown park should be ripped out is emblematic of a flawed understanding about how communities thrive, not to mention short-sighted and monetarily wasteful. In my mind there is no doubt that Spartanburg has positive momentum going and the progress made in the past several years has been uplifting and beneficial to our community. Spartanburg's nightmare days are past us, but the understanding it takes to continue forward is only barely grasped by city council. With the passage of Bill Barnet's mayoral tenure, the city faces a critical transition. I just hope that the city council continues to build upon the first successful foundation our downtown has created in 50 years.

You might have noticed from some of my previous posts that I have a fascination with land use. In particular, I enjoy dense urban spaces, sweeping rural farmland, and untended wilderness. But truth be told, the suburban middle ground has always been tricky territory for me.

Call it nostalgia, but when I look at maps and aerial photos of Spartanburg before cars became quite so widespread, I envy the development patterns I see. The first true aerial photograph I've ever seen of Spartanburg dates from about 1927 (not surprising since that's the year the airport opened). That photo shows a dense downtown pretty much the same size as the one still there, urban neighborhoods, a tight ring of suburbs, and miles upon miles of farmland.

Of course the 82 years that have elapsed since that photograph was taken have brought substantial changes. But in at least one way, things actually haven't changed much at all. Based on the way land use has changed in Spartanburg, you might be tempted to think that our population has exploded. But that's just not true.

The population of the city in 1930? Just over 28,000.

70 years later in 2000? 39,000.

That's a growth of only 39% despite seventy years of border expansions, baby boomers, and all the rest. To add a little more perspective on that, Spartanburg's population rose by about 24% in just the ten years from 1920 to 1930.

In many ways, that meager 39% is the story of small town America, and compared to most, Spartanburg has done well.

But that's really not what I think about most when I look at that photo and compare it with what I see here now. I wonder: Why are we using all this space despite such a small population growth? Is this really the best way to lay out a society? Are we really willing to pay this price for land-use freedom? Why should "the market" dictate this for us? Ignore for a minute all the political complications in this and just think about it: using so much land is wasteful and irresponsible.

And who or what can change it? Our society needs an answer because it needs to change somehow.

Part of what makes the Carolina Piedmont such a distinctive area within the South is the ancestry of its inhabitants. While other parts of the Carolinas are filled with large populations of folks with English, French-Huguenot, West African, and German heritage, ours is largely Scots-Irish. So understanding the characteristics of the Scots-Irish is vital to understanding the cultural heritage of the Carolina Piedmont. The continuity of this culture is so strong that it's even been said that if you want to meet the Scots-Irish, just go find a redneck!

While for some, the terms "redneck" and "hillbilly" conjure up negative stereotypes, for others, they can be a source of pride and a basis for identity. After all, the backwoods hicks of South Carolina pioneered this remote frontier in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, defeated the British Army at the Battle of Cowpens, stood up to unbalanced tariffs during the Nullification Crisis, fought and sacrificed for Southern independence, formed the backbone of the 19th and 20th century textile economy, and have given their sons and daughters to the causes of liberty and justice around the world. In fact, one of the strongest threads that runs through the combined histories of the Scots-Irish pioneer and the Carolina hillbilly is their fierce independence.

Many historical chapters illustrate the independent streak of our local population, but I was reminded of one recently when the museum accepted a rather large artifact into its collection. We were given an heirloom that had been passed down in the donor's wife's family since 1928, when Deputy Sheriff John William Becknell retired from the Spartanburg County Sheriff's Department. As a retirement gift, the officers of the Sheriff's Department presented Mr. Becknell with a copper whiskey still that had been confiscated during a raid in Spartanburg earlier that year. His family kept the hand-forged copper vat until donating it recently.

Homemade spirits have been produced locally since shortly after crops were first grown by Scots-Irish settlers, and despite taxes, laws, and violence, moonshine remained a part of the backwoods way of life. Folks who have studied this topic in the context of Southern history and economics will tell you that moonshine is, in many ways, a product of the Piedmont and Appalachian landscape. When small-scale farmers were able to produce anything beyond what was needed for basic subsistence, transportation became one of the biggest roadblocks. Transporting crops to market is difficult for isolated communities linked only by hilly, mud-filled roadways, and crops might spoil by the time they reached a market. It was far easier and more cost-effective to repackage your corn and grains into a substance that was more compact, brought in good revenue, and would keep unspoiled for years. Moonshine was just such a substance. When homemade spirits became taxed, regulated, and eventually outlawed, it pitted independent-minded locals against agents of the government, a common theme in local history. These battles between moonshiners and "revenuers" intensified during Prohibition, when distilling whiskey became especially profitable for farmers still reeling from the arrival of the boll weevil. Even now, raids do occur, although changes in the economy, and the overall decline of rural life have all but squelched the moonshine tradition. This time, though, it's being given up voluntarily.

Chalk up another victory to redneck independence!

Even though it was the closest thing to civilization for miles around, early Spartanburg was far from civilized. Stories abound about these "wild west" days from the 1780s to the 1850s, when the village was much closer to the American frontier.

Supposedly a couple of Charleston lawyers once had business that brought them to the Spartanburg Courthouse. After an arduous journey of several days through wooded hillsides and treacherous muddy roads, they finally made it to the courthouse square where they found lodging between a couple of saloons. Since it was around dusk already, they bedded down for the night and went to sleep. They were awoken in the middle of the night by a crowd of a dozen or more drunk locals whooping and hollaring in the middle of the square. Just as the two gentlemen lawyers got to the windows to see the commotion, the crowd grew even more unruly and started firing their guns into the air with wild abandon. Astonished and frightened for their lives, the two hunkered down for the night and departed at daybreak, determined to escape this bastion of lawlessness and immorality without delay... court affairs be damned.

The laws entered into the books also give a glimpse of some of the other problems with Spartanburg's unruly population. The flat stretch of East Main Street, between Converse Street and Pine Street apparently was popular among young men who would race their horses without regard to pedestrians and other traffic. It is so surprising then, that this area would give birth to NASCAR in later years?

The large number of downtown saloons, the unruly population, and the complete lack of churches in downtown Spartanburg resulted in one visitor (possibly one of the Charlestonians) labeling Spartanburg "that wicked little village."

Although the saloons stuck around--to say nothing of the unruly population--Spartanburg presumably ceased being wicked by the mid-1830s, when Baptist and Methodist congregations were formed nearly simultaneously.

To all the fans of Spartanburg, please show up to this event on May 27th at 5:30pm on Morgan Square. It should really be a blast.

Read all about it here: http://www.showupforspartanburg.org/

I was browsing through materials in the Kennedy Room recently when I came across a fascinating 1788 summary of the debates that took place in the SC House of Representatives on whether or not to consider the adoption of the current United States Constitution. One quote, a reply from Charles C. Pinckney of Charleston to James Lincoln of Ninety-Six District, particularly caught my eye. Remember that as it was originally adopted, the Constitution did not include a Bill of Rights.

"With regard to liberty of the press, the discussion of that matter was not forgot by the members of the convention; it was fully debated, and the impropriety of saying any thing about it in the constitution clearly evinced. The general government has no powers but what are expressly granted to it; it therefore has no power to take away the liberty of the press--that invaluable blessing which deserves all the encomiums the gentleman has justly bestowed upon it, is secured by all our state constitutions, and to have mentioned it in our general constitution would perhaps furnish an argument hereafter that the general government had a right to excercise powers not expressly delegated to it. For the same reason we had no bill of rights inserted in our constitution, for as we might perhaps have omitted the enumeration of some of our rights, it might hereafter be said we had delegated to the general government a power to take away such of our rights as we had not enumerated; but by delegating express powers we certainly reserve to ourselves every power and right not mentioned in the constitution."

The argument General Pinckney makes here is still strikingly relevant. The framers of the Constitution were so interested in preserving individual liberties that they deliberately left out a listing of rights in the Constitution for fear that rights beyond those listed might be eroded by future federal laws. The counter-argument to this, I suppose, would be that without the guarantee of certain rights by the federal government, states might take away individual liberties. Either way, it demonstrates the very high premium the framers of the Constitution placed on maximizing individual liberties and minimizing federal authority.

This is a tricky topic for me. On the one hand, I generally favor maximum local control. I sympathize with folks who worry about the decreasing power of local governments and the increasing power of national and international forces. This dovetails with my serious concern over globalization and the homogenization of cultures worldwide. I lament that, like so many Southerners of my generation, I have only a very minimal Southern accent and I'm frustrated by how similar Spartanburg's suburbs look to the suburbs of every other town in the United States. How much this has to do with the balance of power between levels of government is tough to say. I won't get into it here, but I think the answer has to do with the power of corporations and the power of government to limit them.

So I would be all about maximum local control (within the current framework) were it not for a few huge issues that cannot be solved on that level. Managing the issues resulting from globalization (such as runaway corporate influence) is one of those problems. The other is the environment. Spartanburg could become the greenest city in the world (ha!), and it wouldn't make a dent in the problems facing the environment. That's not to say that anyone should give up. Every effort is desperately needed. One way or another: it HAS to be solved. Or we go extinct. People need to get extremely serious about this. There is no counter-argument that can be made. Unsustainability = human extinction.

And that's a whole lot bigger than worrying about whether someone in Columbia votes for something or whether someone in Washington does.

By the way, every single representative of the Spartan District at the 1788 SC Constitutional Convention voted against adopting the United States Constitution, presumably because of the loss of local control.

Now that I've been working as a full-time local historian for about two years, I've grown to realize that my primary historical interest has to do with land use and urban spaces. That's not to say that I don't have other interests within local history also, but I seem to frequently come back to investigating changes in the visual appearance and use of space in Spartanburg. The two primary research media for those interests are photography and maps. Photography comes up all the time in my work, and I hope to someday make it an even more central part of my job, but I seldom get the opportunity to focus much time on maps.

Fortunately for me, though, I've been spending nearly all of my time at the history museum lately working with historic maps and blueprints. All this work is in preparation for the next exhibit, which opens at the end of this month. The exhibit, Charting our Heritage, focuses on maps depicting Spartanburg and surrounding areas from the 18th century onward. At this stage, there is still a good bit of work left to do, although my current focus (encapsulating maps in conservation-grade plastic) is wrapping up. (punny?)

It should be a really wonderful exhibit, so please come and check it out. And for those of you in Hampton Heights, Converse Heights, the east side, or downtown, there will be more than a few maps of your neighborhood worth checking out.

By the way, as much as I wish the illustration above were a real book, I should confess that it's merely a shamelessly Photoshopped real atlas cover.