Table Of Contentthe
U.S. South
and
Europe
Transatlantic Relations
in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries
Edited by Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg
The U.S. South
and Europe
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van Minnen South BOOK.indb 2 9/30/2013 11:49:26 AM
The U.S. South
and Europe
Transatlantic Relations
in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Edited by
Cornelis A. van Minnen
and
Manfred Berg
van Minnen South BOOK.indb 3 9/30/2013 11:49:26 AM
Copyright © 2013 by The University Press of Kentucky
Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,
serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky,
Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown
College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State
University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania
University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,
and Western Kentucky University.
All rights reserved.
Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky
663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008
www.kentuckypress.com
17 16 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The U.S. South and Europe : transatlantic relations in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries / edited by Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg.
pages cm. — (New directions in southern history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8131-4308-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-8131-4319-4 (pdf) — ISBN 978-0-8131-4318-7 (epub)
1. Southern States—Relations—Europe. 2. Europe—Relations—Southern
States. 3. Southern States—Foreign public opinion, European. 4. Southern
States—Race relations. I. Minnen, Cornelis A. van. II. Berg, Manfred, 1959-
III. Title: United States South and Europe.
F209.U15 2013
305.800975—dc23 2013030209
This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting
the requirements of the American National Standard
for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Member of the Association of
American University Presses
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Contents
The U.S. South and Europe: An Introduction 1
Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg
1. Southerners Abroad: Europe and the Cultural Encounter,
1830–1895 15
William A. Link
2. Alexis de Tocqueville and Three German Travel Accounts on the
Antebellum South and New Orleans 33
Thomas Clark
3. The German Forty-Eighters’ Critique of the U.S. South,
1850–1861 51
Daniel Nagel
4. “In the Days of Her Power and Glory”: Visions of Venice in
Antebellum Charleston 73
Kathleen Hilliard
5. Elizabethan Dreams, Victorian Nightmares: Antebellum South
Carolina’s Future through an English Looking Glass 87
Lawrence T. McDonnell
6. Slavery or Independence: The Confederate Dilemma in Europe 105
Don H. Doyle
7. The Lynching of Southern Europeans in the Southern United States:
The Plight of Italian Immigrants in Dixie 125
Stefano Luconi
8. Southern Politicians, British Reformers, and Ida B. Wells’s 1893–1894
Transatlantic Antilynching Campaign 145
Sarah L. Silkey
9. Transatlantic Fundamentalism: Southern Preachers in London’s
Pulpits during World War I 165
William R. Glass
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10. Europeans Interpret the American South of the Civil War Era:
How British and French Critics Received The Birth of a Nation (1915)
and Gone With the Wind (1939) 181
Melvyn Stokes
11. Gunnar Myrdal and Arthur Raper in the Jim Crow South 205
Louis Mazzari
12. Explaining Jim Crow to German Prisoners of War: The Impact of the
South on the World War II Reeducation Program 223
Matthias Reiss
13. Britain, the American South, and the Wide Civil Rights
Movement 243
Clive Webb
14. Resisting the Wind of Change: The Citizens’ Councils and European
Decolonization 265
Daniel Geary and Jennifer Sutton
Acknowledgments 283
List of Contributors 285
Index 291
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The U.S. South and Europe
An Introduction
Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg
The U.S. South has always been a distinctive region: not only in the eyes of
Americans from other sections of the United States but also in the percep-
tion of many Europeans. Once considered as the epitome of isolation and
backwardness, the South has recently evoked considerable interest among
popular audiences as well as among academic observers on both sides of the
Atlantic. One reason why the South captivates national and international
attention is its stunning economic development. In 1938 President Franklin
D. Roosevelt famously called the region “the Nation’s No. 1 economic prob-
lem.” In 1994 New York Times journalist Peter Applebome described the
South “as a dominant economic, political and cultural force in American
life.” Applebome aptly noted that “to understand America, it is necessary
to make sense of the South.”1 Surely the South is the key to understand-
ing recent American politics and the rise of conservatism in particular.
As political scientists Earl Black and Merle Black have demonstrated, the
South, with its growing population and congressional representation, pro-
vides the Republican Party with its core white conservative constituency.
The peculiar fusion of evangelical conservatism and free-market capitalism
that many Europeans find hard to comprehend originated in the South.2
Then again, President Bill Clinton, a southern Democrat, has enjoyed great
popularity among Europeans for two decades not least because he personi-
fies the easygoing side of southern culture.
European interest in the American South is not confined to contem-
porary politics but has a long history predicated on perceived cultural dif-
ferences between the South and the rest of the United States. As British
scholar Helen Taylor explains the region’s transatlantic appeal: “Long asso-
ciated with hot passions and tempers—of the blues, the Ku Klux Klan,
voodoo, and rock and roll—the South is a region associated deliciously
1
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2 Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg
with forbidden and guilty desire, racial and sexual violence, and excess of
all kinds. Such associations have lingered since the mid-nineteenth century,
when Harriet Beecher Stowe’s international bestseller Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1852) first defined it to the world as a gothic, demonic region.” Modern
commentators, such as V. S. Naipaul and John Berendt, also feel that “the
South is unutterably different (whether for better or worse) and that it
involves different kinds of perception and judgment than those in the rest
of the United States.”3
By the late twentieth century, however, Dixie and the nation had become
much more akin. According to historian Paul Harvey, the American zeit-
geist had moved to the South.4 In a stunning reversal of the Great Migration,
both white and black Americans began moving below the Mason-Dixon
line in large numbers. Enthusiasm for southern culture manifested itself in
the popularity of southern music, especially country music, and southern
sports such as stock-car racing. Books, movies, and television series dealing
with southern history from the Civil War to the civil rights movement have
attracted large audiences. The South has also experienced a boom in the
academic world. Following up on the success of his pioneering Encyclopedia
of Southern Culture, published in 1989, Charles Reagan Wilson launched
the impressive twenty-four-volume New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.5
Spearheaded by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the Univer-
sity of Mississippi in Oxford and the Center for the Study of the American
South at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, southern stud-
ies programs have mushroomed at American universities. As U.S. historians
emphasized the centrality of slavery and race in American history, southern
history also moved to the center of the historical profession.6
The ascendency of the South has not gone unnoticed in Europe. In a
special survey of the U.S. South published in December 1994, the London
Economist noted cheerfully: “The South is enjoying its best years since the
Civil War.” The region, “like Sleeping Beauty, [had] awakened from 100
years of slumber . . . [and] is marking out a new future. And in doing so it
is beating a path for the whole country. In its economy, its politics and even
in its race relations, the South is once more full of a long-forgotten confi-
dence—at just a time when confidence seems to be deserting the rest of
doubting America.” The issue featured a section entitled “The Southerniza-
tion of America,” arguing that “the South is leading the nation” and that
“this unusual position” would make “a nice change from most of its his-
tory.” The liberal Guardian seconded that “America’s gone South.”7
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Introduction 3
In 2007, the Economist published yet another special report on the
American South, showing the magazine’s continued fascination with the
region. The weekly admitted that the South still lagged behind in edu-
cation compared to the rest of the country and that its prosperity was
unevenly spread but asked its readers: “What other region with such a tur-
bulent history is now so pleasant to live in?” In the years 2004–2005 the
South had attracted some 1.3 million people from other parts of the United
States, including many African Americans and Mexican immigrants. “And
all who come,” the Economist emphasized, “come voluntarily.” It was clear
to the magazine that “the South has shed some of its bad habits, but none
of its charm,” and it described the region as “peaceful, pleasant and pros-
perous.” For the Economist the question was no longer “will the South rise
again?” but “will it one day overtake the North?”8
Echoing their U.S. colleagues, many European scholars of American
history and culture have also developed a sustained interest in the South.
Since 1988 this interest finds expression in the Southern Studies Forum, a
group of historians and literary scholars from Europe and the United States
who meet at workshops during the biennial conferences of the European
Association for American Studies and at theme-based symposia. In 2005,
for instance, the Southern Studies Forum meeting was held at the Roosevelt
Study Center in Middelburg, the Netherlands, and resulted in the publica-
tion of a collection of essays entitled Poverty and Progress in the U.S. South
since 1920.9 In April 2011 the Roosevelt Study Center reaffirmed its com-
mitment to southern studies when it organized a conference entitled “The
U.S. South and Europe” as part of its biennial conferences on American
history, which include participants from both sides of the Atlantic. The
papers given at the 2011 meeting focused on various aspects of the relation-
ship between the American South and Europe throughout the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
As editors of the ensuing volume we believe that the scholarship pre-
sented at the 2011 Middelburg conference merits the interest of a wider
audience. To begin with, the following essays demonstrate that the history
of the encounter between the U.S. South and Europe is an emerging field
and an excellent case in point that the study of American history—and
southern history at that—benefits from a transnational perspective.10 In
the last decade a number of scholars have made an effort to study southern
engagement with the world.11 It is our aim in this volume to broaden an
existing historiographical current that deals with the U.S. South in transat-
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