TY - JOUR
AU - Dailey,, Jane
AB - Can one person change the past? And through that, shape the future? These were necessary questions for historians of the American South before the 1950s, when southern history was still trapped in oppositional narratives that divided along race lines. These questions were also pertinent for someone interested in mounting a historical reclamation process—of herself as well as her region, in the 1940s. By investigating her past as a white southerner, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, an economist and sharp observer of life in many dimensions, turned her memories of home to the purpose of social critique. Her aim was to use her own life to demonstrate how the culture of white supremacy was reproduced and how it could be overcome. Katharine Lumpkin is one of three remarkable Lumpkin sisters who together people Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s magisterial Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America. With breathtaking sweep and narrative artistry, this six-hundred-page book (not counting the bibliography) chronicles the lives of two social and political activists and their older sister over the first half of the twentieth century. The sisters are the three Lumpkins: Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine, originally of Georgia, then South Carolina. The rebels are chiefly Grace and Katharine, who drive the narrative. The eldest Lumpkin, Elizabeth, appears intermittently and was a radical if not a rebel: in her role as a Confederate sympathizer and apologist, Elizabeth contributed to the late nineteenth-century falsification of the South’s slave and Confederate past, which Katharine would work so hard to overturn. “Writing in different contexts, in distinct genres, and in conscious or unconscious dialogue with one another,” Hall writes, “each of the Lumpkin sisters enacted a hope and a promise: dissident Southerners of different classes could fashion new selves and a new society from the materials of the old” (270). Handicapped by a scarcity of primary sources, many of which were destroyed by the protagonists, Hall describes her book as a “rendition,” not a biography (9). Breaking the bonds of biography offers Hall more narrative leeway, and allows her to duck certain consequential questions, including Katharine’s sexual identity. In addition to her own encyclopedic knowledge of southern history, Hall’s sources consist mainly of the two sisters’ published writings, a cache of papers meant to have been destroyed, and FBI files obtained through a civil suit Hall brought against the Justice Department. Hall is straightforward about this limitation in sources. Her solution is to tell the story “Katharine’s way”—by focusing on “the self-in-society, considering the undertow of the psyche but stressing politics and ideas” (9). Remarkably, notably, she succeeds. Whereas Elizabeth was married off to a doctor in a Confederate-themed wedding, Grace and Katharine Lumpkin were both “educated into activism” within a female universe of progressive institutions that became their stepping stones to the wider world. Both sisters received quality educations at Brenau College, an “island of tolerance and progressivism in Georgia.” Their experience at Brenau was augmented by their work with the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA)—an organization whose combination of women’s activism and liberal Christianity was vital to the educations of innumerable young women in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Hall gives the YWCA the central platform it deserves. The Y trained multiple generations of southern women, white and black, to engage each other and their society and improve it. It was on record as endorsing the social creed of “brotherhood” enunciated by the liberal Federal Council of Churches. The Y “offered a religious message that would have ‘eruptive consequences.’ It also provided models of independent womanhood and pathways for engagement with the wider world” (83). Liberal Christianity, Hall concludes, was, “quite simply, indispensable” to reformers in the South (86). Linking white liberal Christian activism in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s to the prophetic theology of the black church and existentialism, Hall draws a line of continuity from the 1920s through the 1960s and asserts that practically every white southern student who stood with the civil rights program in the 1960s “seems to have been mentored by the YWCA or another social gospel–based youth organization.” Together, white and black southern women ignited “an intergenerational chain of learning” to bolster the southern labor and racial justice movements (153). Both Katharine and Grace were employed by the YWCA after graduation from Brenau. Grace worked for the Y in France and then South Carolina after World War I; Katharine studied at the YWCA National Training School and took her knowledge home with her, becoming the national student secretary for the South. In this role, Katharine collaborated with white industrial (labor) secretaries to “empower working women and create cross-class alliances” and worked with the black student secretaries to transform racial attitudes and practices and design a program on interracial education. Both strands of Katharine’s education from these years informed her career to come (153). In the 1920s, Katharine and Grace both, in different ways, sought to understand the white South. Grace’s approach was to live among the poor whites in the mountains—the source of the migration from the land to the many cotton mills—and tell their stories. Employing the data-gathering skills acquired during her time in college and the YWCA, Katharine and a group of young women set out to learn what the South was really like. “We sought out experts, went to the census, read official reports, followed legislative battles over limiting women’s hours and the ages at which children could go to work.” They became experts themselves, working in southern industry (Katharine worked in a shoe factory). They noted the way mill owners used their social influence and political power to block progressive legislation. “Ever so gradually,” Katharine writes, “we began to learn how poor our Southern whites really were, and how many were poor.” The South, she saw, “was now an [industrial] economy,” driven by cheap white labor. For the South to be prosperous, she concluded, “the majority of its people must remain poverty-stricken.” That “majority” included African American farmers, she recognized: Did that not mean that whites and blacks were in a similar class situation, and that “surely wage-earning whites and Negroes were, functionally speaking, not so unlike after all” (Katharine Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner [1947], 217–222)? This early research on the white South would inform Katharine’s later work during the New Deal, as she answered President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s call for policy proposals to address “the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem.” The Lumpkin sisters’ lives diverged after World War I. Elizabeth remained in South Carolina. Katharine relocated to New York’s Upper West Side, to study at Columbia, where this “self-conscious Southerner” earned a master’s degree in sociology. Grace gravitated toward the Lower East Side, where she wrote for a small socialist paper, the World Tomorrow. Grace’s first taste of no-holds-barred industrial action was the 1926 strike at the woolen mills in Passaic, New Jersey. Grace reported on the strikers, half of whom were women. Caught up in the labor movement, Grace, as Hall puts it, shaped “a new persona, that of the activist writer who amplifies the voices of the dispossessed” (228). She and her flatmate, Esther Shemitz, became friendly with local Communists. Esther married a reporter who would one day become “the hottest literary Bolshevik,” Whittaker Chambers. Soon after, Grace married Michael Intrator, a Jewish Communist leader of the militant fur trades and twelve years Grace’s junior. Having shared accommodations with Grace and Michael before they married, after their wedding Esther and Whit got their own apartment in the building that adjoined Mike and Grace’s place. The men cut a door between the apartments so that Esther and Whit would have access to a bathroom. Details such as these create a sense of intimacy and capture the everyday. Hall’s capacity to spot such moments and weave them into the plot creates knowledge and unresolved tension. The reader doesn’t have to be a historian to know that when a Communist cuts a door into an apartment inhabited by Whittaker Chambers, it’s not going to turn out well. In New York, Grace lived the life of the radical intellectual. She reported on labor issues for the New Masses, was arrested at a protest in support of Sacco and Vanzetti, and, memorably, published a piece in the Baltimore Afro-American and the Daily Worker in 1932 titled “Why I as a White Southern Woman Will Vote Communist.” The defining moment for her was the 1929 North Carolina Gastonia textile strike, in which, organized by the Communist-led National Textile Workers Union of America, thousands of mill workers walked off the job. Her first and best novel, To Make My Bread, was set in the context of Gastonia and explored how interlocking gender, race, and class relations shaped the lives of working-class men and women caught up in the industrial revolution in the mountains. Grace, says Hall, exemplified the roles of women as organizers, artists, and cultural transmitters. Critics aligned with the Communists had called for proletarian fiction, meaning works written from the perspective of working-class people or in sympathy with socialist values. “No one expected the call for radical fiction to be answered by women inspired by an uprising of workers in the American South,” remarks Hall wryly (255). Published in 1932, To Make My Bread was well reviewed and made Grace “a left-wing literary star” (278). After her YWCA work, Katharine found herself a student at Columbia, where the divide between knowledge and identity was challenged. Questioned by a group of African American students who were especially knowledgeable about the South, Katharine realized that she had never studied the South but rather assumed that her identity as a southerner qualified her to pass judgment. For all her love of history, Katharine realized that she had never “gone to the sources,” or “checked facts against hearsay,” or “sorted out ‘unbiased from biased history.’” She had never thought critically about the southern past. As she recalled dryly years later, after a career spent serving the evidentiary demands of the social sciences, Katharine realized her southernness had protected her from “the ‘devastating potency of facts’” (132). Katharine left Columbia chastened and disappointed in the education she was offered: “I felt I was handed a stone when I had come here for bread” (Making of a Southerner, 205). She moved on to the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a Ph.D. in economics. Her life in Madison was fulfilling, personally as well as professionally. There she met Dorothy Douglas, a fellow economist and political radical who would become her partner for thirty years. A twig on a branch of the Kuhn, Loeb & Co. investment banking family, Dorothy had resources to keep them both afloat and to do things like buy a house and turn it into an institute for labor studies. In this house in Northampton, Massachusetts, near Smith College, where Dorothy worked, Katharine first took up writing about the South—and, inevitably, about herself and her family. Before Katharine published her defining book, The Making of a Southerner, in 1947, she had published, either on her own or with Dorothy, several other books. Some of these related directly to the South, such as The South in Progress (1940), a regional political analysis that emphasized Katharine’s long-held position that white supremacy is a “social-economic-psychological complex” (quoted on 389). Beginning in this book and continuing in The Making of a Southerner, Katharine, says Hall, acted on her belief that “when faced with challenging contradictions and experiences, individuals can liberate themselves from racist phobias and beliefs.” Throughout the 1940s, Katharine sought to “transform the place she had left behind” by telling about the South. As Hall puts it movingly, “Together, these two books reveal a self-conscious Southerner in motion, writing her way home” (390). Grace was moving, but in another direction altogether. In the late 1940s she put aside her proletariat-focused projects “in the name of an imagined return to God and home” (386). She had quit the Communist Party (characteristically, through a public statement, “An Ex-Communist Speaks”), and by 1948 she was an informant in the trial of diplomat Alger Hiss. Grace’s old friend Whittaker Chambers had accused Hiss of being a Communist spy. Grace testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee on several occasions, where she explained that Communists were “in a real sense self-made psychopaths” (quoted on 379). In the 1930s and 1940s, Katharine and Dorothy had belonged to many groups that were on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations. Although it seems that Grace did not inform on Katharine and Dorothy then, she did later in interviews with the FBI, marking both as Communists in varying degrees. Dorothy fell victim to the anti-Communist assault on higher education and was driven from Smith. She was unbowed and remained on the FBI’s Security Index until her death in 1968. As a college student, Katharine witnessed the power of D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation to harden and transform historical understanding. “Who knows what the picture aimed to say?” Katharine wondered. “Maybe nothing—some said so—just a spectacle, with new techniques.” Whatever the message, Katharine experienced the emotional power of the film, which she felt had turned the soil on recently buried sentiments. “I felt old sentiments stir, and a haunting nostalgia, which told me that much that I thought had been left behind must still be ahead” (Making of a Southerner, 200). This critical self-evaluation distinguishes Katharine Lumpkin from other twentieth-century white southern writers who, Hall points out, never “took up the challenge of confronting the author’s immersion in and complicity with the South’s caste system” (400). Yet Katharine was not just a memoirist. She was a social scientist; her observations of the South around her were processed and analyzed and applied to herself in a way most uncommon among autobiographers. Her goal was not to simply tell her own story, but to confront the “role of race in making Southerners what they are” (quoted on 401). It was a massive undertaking in its day, and a timely one. She was one white southerner who understood that, as James Baldwin observed in The Fire Next Time, accepting one’s history is not the same thing as drowning in it. © The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America.
JO - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/rhz821
DA - 2020-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/jacquelyn-dowd-hall-sisters-and-rebels-a-struggle-for-the-soul-of-60zf6dShgY
SP - 597
VL - 125
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -