Introduction

Ruth Coker Burks (born Frances Ruth Coker in 1959) is an Arkansas woman who was a caregiver and AIDS activist in central Arkansas from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In 1986, when Burks began her informal care work, she was a mid-twenties single mother who sold timeshare condominiums on Lake Hamilton near her hometown of Hot Springs in central Arkansas. Over the next few years, her informal end-of-life care expanded into daily care work, AIDS activism, and education. Newspaper and magazine profiles, television interviews, a popular memoir, and social media posts have documented her efforts as the ‘Arkansas Cemetery Angel’ (we will refer to Ruth Coker Burks as Ruth since this is how she is named in her memoir and in most press coverage). Laudatory media coverage also led to pointed criticisms of the limits of Ruth’s efforts and to potential flaws in her memory. Rather than evaluating the accuracy of Ruth’s account or those of her critics, this article investigates what her rich, if fragmentary, archival materials, along with her published memoir and newspaper accounts, can reveal about care work, gender, and the lived experience of the AIDS epidemic in Arkansas. More broadly, it begins to address what the publicity (and controversy) around Ruth’s life story offers the study of queer memory in southern spaces.

Ruth’s career as an AIDS caregiver and activist began with a case of mistaken maternal identity and a contested family cemetery. As described in newspaper profiles and her memoir, All the Young Men (2020), in 1986, while visiting a friend in the hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas's capital city, Ruth noticed a neglected patient, Jimmy, who was dying of complications from AIDS. When she went into Jimmy's hospital room, he mistook Ruth for his mother, who refused to visit him. After she confronted the nursing staff, who largely avoided Jimmy's room and failed to convince his mother (over the phone) to come to visit her dying son, Ruth returned to Jimmy's room. And it was as his ‘mama’ that Ruth sat by his bedside for hours, holding his hand and comforting him as he died. This moment of assumed maternal identity marked the beginning of Ruth's decade of informal care work.¹Ruth Coker Burks and Kevin Carr O’Leary, All The Young Men: A Memoir of Love, AIDS, and Chosen Family in the American South (New York: Grove Press, 2020), 3–11; Michael Garofalo, “Lessons in Love,” StoryCorps, December 5, 2014, https://storycorps.org/podcast/storycorps-449-lessons-in-love/; David Koon, “Ruth Coker Burks: The Cemetery Angel,” Arkansas Times, January 8, 2015, https://arktimes.com/news/cover-stories/2015/01/08/ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel.

Alongside care work and public activism, Ruth provided a final resting place for some men she cared for in the Files Cemetery in Hot Springs, an hour's drive southwest of Little Rock in the Ouachita Mountains. It was for Jimmy, who had mistaken Ruth for his mother, that she turned to Files Cemetery.

From the first chapter of Ruth’s memoir, the Files Cemetery is described as a site of commemoration, refuge, and conflict.²Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 11–14. In the following decades, this cemetery has become an essential site of LGBTQ+ memory in Arkansas. Layers of informal commemoration at the Files Cemetery and Ruth’s fragmentary archival record speak to the kinds of alternative archives of AIDS activism—beyond the public sphere—that Stephen Vider has examined in his discussion of community caregiving during the AIDS epidemic as part of his more extensive study of the importance of domestic spaces in LGBTQ+ politics in the United States.³Stephen Vider, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021). As far as we know, the Files Cemetery is one of only a few cemeteries in the United States that became a documented resting place for people who died during the HIV/AIDS epidemic.⁴Two other documented final resting places for those who died during the HIV/AIDS epidemic are the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, DC and the Hart Island Potter's Field in New York City. The Files Cemetery operates at a much smaller and more informal scale than either of these.

There also is scattered but evocative evidence of continuing engagement with the Files Cemetery as a space for queer memory-making. Facebook posts from March 2019 record how the drag troupe, the Arkansas Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence: The Abbey of the Hillbilly Harlots, cared for the cemetery’s grounds and planted rose bushes. A series of photographs of the Files Cemetery taken at regular intervals from spring 2020 to fall 2024, which are part of a forthcoming donation to the Center for Arkansas History and Culture, reveal earlier layers of informal commemoration (including notes, beer bottles, Mardi Gras beads, and devotional objects) near the resting places of some of the men. In 2020, a grave was added to the cemetery (of which Ruth was unaware.) Some of these later commemorative efforts at individual graves did not involve Ruth and were potentially enacted by local critics of Ruth, as evidenced by one stone that was partially funded by a critical host of a YouTube podcast.

Praise extended to the national and international levels. The first prominent news article on Ruth, which predated the Arkansas Times' profile, was a twelve-minute interview with NPR's StoryCorps in 2014. The December 7, 2020, issue of People magazine featured a glowing article, “They Call Me the AIDS Angel.”⁵Jason Sheeler, “They Call Me the AIDS Angel,” People, December 7, 2020. Exemplifying Ruth's newfound fame, the Guardian published an article on February 3, 2021 titled, "The Aids Angel: How Ruth Coker Burks Comforted Dying Gay Men." That same year, however, the Arkansas Times published a more critical piece by Austin Gelder about a “missing monument.” Gelder's piece centered on accusations that Burks had exaggerated some of her claims and failed to establish a much-discussed monument at the Files Cemetery in honor of those for whom she had cared.⁶Austin Gelder, “Ruth Coker Burks and the Missing Monument,” Arkansas Times, July 8, 2021, https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2021/07/08/ruth-coker-burks-and-the-missing-monument. National press coverage trended from the laudatory to the skeptical with pointed questions about Ruth's claims about the number of men for whom she cared, the number of gravesites at the Files Cemetery, and her contested ownership of the cemetery.⁷Alexander Kacala, “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men,” NBC News, October 29, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/doubts-surround-viral-story-aids-angel-says-helped-hundreds-dying-men-rcna4163. These critiques came largely from residents of Hot Springs, some of whom knew Ruth, some of whom wanted a more thorough history of the events, some who are invested in the history and its public telling, and also those who feel that her version of events is somehow maligning the city. A YouTube podcast, RUTHLESS: The Real Story Behind the ‘Cemetery Angel of Arkansas’ is representative of this critique and is discussed in more detail below. In the wake of this praise and criticism, the Center for Arkansas History and Culture at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock has collected Ms. Burks’ archival materials in an ongoing effort to preserve LGBTQ+ history in Arkansas. The CAHC's archival work complements that of Invisible Histories—an organization who "believes archiving is resistance to oppression and history leads to liberation"—to document queer histories and spaces of memory in the southern United States.⁸"Invisible Histories." Accessed January 3, 2025. https://invisiblehistory.org/.

This article discusses the history of Ruth's care work and activism in central Arkansas in the broader context of scholarship on gender and care work during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We will survey the gendered construction of care work and motherhood in Arkansas in Ruth’s memoir and archival materials. Then, we will tackle the life histories of the predominantly white and Latino working class and rural men she cared for and what her archive—with its evocative fragments and enduring silences— reveals about the lived experience of the AIDS epidemic for some people in Arkansas. We conclude with Ruth’s critics and what her story can teach about the contested memory of the AIDS epidemic. This article does not attempt to evaluate the accuracy of the claims of either Ruth or her local critics, but rather examines the possibilities and limits that her archive, and the published materials about her, open up. The historical importance of Ruth’s care work and the validity of some of the criticisms of her are not incompatible. Rather than a binary understanding, we are interested in what Ruth’s archive reveals about the history of the AIDS epidemic and the construction of the role of the idealized caregiver for some women in Arkansas.

Care Work and AIDS Activism in Arkansas

Ruth was one of many women across the United States who played leading roles in AIDS activism and care. As the ACT UP Oral History Project states, “Women were an integral part of the AIDS crisis—first, and foremost, as People with AIDS, but also as leaders of the AIDS Activist Movement, and as caregivers.”⁹“Women and AIDS,” ACT UP Oral History Project, digital archive, https://www.actuporalhistory.org/actions/women-aids. Ruth’s trajectory reflects what scholars have argued was the complex array of personal, political, social, and spiritual motivations behind many women’s activism during the AIDS epidemic in the United States.¹⁰See, for example, Ulrike Boehmer, The Personal and the Political: Women’s Activism in Response to the Breast Cancer and AIDS Epidemics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); Angelique Harris, “Emotions, Feelings, and Social Change: Love, Anger, and Solidarity in Black Women’s AIDS Activism,” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 6, no. 2 (2018): 181–201; For a more expansive history of women’s activism in the United States, see Dawn Durante, ed., Women’s Activist Organizing in US History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022).

Ruth was a single mother who sold lakeshore timeshares in Hot Springs when she began her informal care work. Her work's flexible and commission-based practices facilitated Ruth’s initial care work. AIDS activism and end-of-life care were not how recently divorced Ruth planned to spend her twenties and early thirties. “All I want sometimes is to be a wife and be in the Junior League.”¹¹Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 74. While Ruth did not come from a well-off background, she hoped to advance in the social scene of Hot Springs. Ruth’s care work encompassed a shifting range of activities from 1986 to 1995. Initially, she focused on visiting the hospital, comforting dying men, and providing supplemental food for those still alive.¹²Burks and O’Leary, 62; Paula Cocozza, “The AIDS Angel: How Ruth Coker Burks Comforted Dying Gay Men,” The Guardian, February 3, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/03/aids-angel-ruth-coker-burks-dying-gay-men. As she described at one point (she had started dumpster-diving to get adequate cooking supplies), “I could be like this little grocery-delivery person.”¹³Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 96. Word of mouth drove her first few years of care work as anxious Little Rock and Hot Springs hospital staff contacted her. “More calls started coming. I guess the nurses and doctors all went to the same places to drink and unwind because I later found out they got to talking. ‘Oh my God, we had this insane woman come in, and she went right in the AIDS patient’s room.’ . . . I had two calls that first month, which I thought was crazy. Then three the second.”¹⁴Burks and O’Leary, 24–25.

This soon shifted to men calling her directly, either for themselves or for a friend or loved one. As Ruth notes, by 1988, this “network of calls from the hospitals and gay men giving out my number” kept her more than busy, along with caring for her young daughter and trying to make a living.¹⁵Burks and O’Leary, 54, 83. It is important not to reify the assumption that persons with HIV/AIDS were always gay men, even if that is often how Ruth discusses her experiences in central Arkansas in her memoir. Ruth’s archive and the ambiguities surrounding the Files Cemetery underline the importance of not projecting contemporary categories onto the past and respecting privacy in the telling of these histories.

From 1986 to 1989, Ruth worked quietly, and from 1989 onwards, she was much more public in attempting to raise awareness and draw local media attention to the AIDS epidemic in central Arkansas. Building on her connections to some of “the town elders” of Hot Springs, Ruth also gave talks at Rotary Clubs across Arkansas and quietly facilitated donations from well-to-do residents of Hot Springs. In her description of one of her early speeches at Rotary, “I talked about the people with AIDS in town, how they needed food and access to care, but what we mainly needed was education.”¹⁶Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 125, 129–134, 184, 257. Formalizing her activism, Ruth assisted Norman Jones, who ran the Arkansas non-profit, Helping People with AIDS (HPWA.) Ruth’s work with HPWA encompassed everything from the distribution of accessible sex education materials to creative publicity efforts, including the production of humorous T-shirts with the phrase “I believe in Jesus. Do you?” transformed into “I DO. DO YOU?” about safer sex practices.¹⁷Burks and O’Leary, 270–271.

The sharply diverging reactions to Ruth in the present-day echo in her recollections of care work and AIDS activism from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Ruth claims that initially, she was perceived as a prim “‘church lady’” by many of the men she cared for. However, she remembers that to most of Hot Springs, she was viewed as “this insane woman” and “that crazy Ruth Coker Burks,” who wouldn’t stop talking about AIDS and gay rights.¹⁸Ruth Coker Burks, "All Her Sons: The Cemetery Angel," interview by Seth Doane, Video, December 1, 2019, CBS Sunday Morning, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/all-her-sons-ruth-coker-burks-the-cemetery-angel/; Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 24, 94, 156.

Along with public-facing activism, Ruth’s informal hospice care evolved from providing company at the bedside of dying men to helping ‘her guys’ live as long as they could by securing housing assistance, filling out death certificates, seeking social security payments, filling AZT prescriptions at often hostile local pharmacies, HIV testing, and ultimately AIDS education.¹⁹Koon, “Ruth Coker Burks: The Cemetery Angel”; Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 57–58, 72, 81–83, 86–88, 112–113. Ruth regularly visited hospitals in Hot Springs and Little Rock and frequently cared for people in their homes. At times, she appears to have operated as an informal pharmacy herself, distributing leftover AIDS medication across central Arkansas.²⁰Garofalo, “Lessons in Love”; Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 173. These shifts did not mean she stopped providing personal daily attention. For example, in her time with one of the men for whom she cared, Chip, she visited daily, fed him, bathed him, and read him the newspaper.²¹Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 234. In his study of queer public history and the home, Vider challenges the often-presumed division between political action (outside of the home) and care work (inside the home). Rather than framing the home as a space away from politics, Vider argues that the home and the care for people with AIDS in their own homes constitute an essential site for activism.²²Vider, The Queerness of Home, 179–213. The contours of Ruth's care work reflect Vider's argument.

While Ruth’s individualized efforts to keep ‘her guys’ fed are distinct from the more extensive history of food justice organizing in the twentieth-century United States that Emily Twarog studies in Politics of the Pantry (2017), food was at the center of Ruth’s work, especially in the late 1980s, and her subsequent gendered construction as a caregiving angel.²³Emily E. LB. Twarog, Politics of the Pantry: Housewives, Food, and Consumer Protest in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). In early media profiles from 2014 and 2015, Ruth estimated that she cared for "nearly 1,000 people" and "hundreds of dying people" from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.²⁴Garofalo, “Lessons in Love”; Koon, “Ruth Coker Burks: The Cemetery Angel.” As discussed below, these numbers have been contested. While it is beyond the scope of this article to fully address how Ruth’s efforts intersected with formal and informal care networks in Arkansas, there were additional organized efforts, including the important work of RAIN (Regional AIDS Interfaith Network), which was profiled in a 2016 Arkansas Times piece, among others.

Ruth’s unprocessed archival collection at the Center for Arkansas History and Culture provides some indications of how her care work intersected with broader caregiving networks in Arkansas. Specifically, her archives include a binder of letters of recommendation and typed endorsements from prominent community members regarding Ruth’s nomination for the Arkansas Community Service Award, the establishment of an HIV/AIDS program at Levi Hospital, and the nomination of Ruth for the position of Executive Director of the Arkansas AIDS Foundation. In one letter, the assistant director of the American Psychological Association recommended Ruth for the Arkansas Community Service Award with the argument that “Ruth’s efforts in promoting the conference have remained unflagging. Most impressively, Ruth has served without remuneration, preferring that we hire two part-time local coordinators from our community of those directly affected by AIDS. As one of our local coordinators has suffered an unfortunate precipitous decline in health. Ruth has generously stepped forward to assume his responsibilities while insisting that he still receive the full salary offered for the position.” A local attorney wrote in a separate letter of recommendation, “I would like to recommend Ruth Burks as the person to get this program started. Ruth has demonstrated her commitment to the care of those who are HIV positive and we are fortunate to have someone already in the community who is prepared to immediately take on such a responsibility.”²⁵These recommendation letters are part of Ruth's collection donated to and being processed by the Center for Arkansas History and Culture. Box 6, Folder 20, Ruth Coker Burks papers, Center for Arkansas History and Culture, Little Rock, Arkansas.

Ruth's memoirs and archives only get us so far in researching the experience of AIDS in Arkansas and of women activists during the AIDS epidemic. Ruth remembers primarily, but not exclusively, caring for white and Latinx men. Her life story and archival materials tell us little about the impact of HIV/AIDS on Black communities in Arkansas (15.5% of the Hot Springs population in 1990) or the work of Black women in AIDS activism both at the state and national levels. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the central role of Black women to AIDS activism and care work in the United States. In her influential study of Black women activists, Angelique Harris argues for the importance of the intersecting emotions of love, compassion, community solidarity, anger, and frustration in AIDS activism and care work.²⁶Harris, “Emotions, Feelings, and Social Change,” 181–183, 186–188, 191–195.

While this article centers upon Ruth’s life and her account of primarily caring for white and Latinx men, it is critical to acknowledge how racial disparities in healthcare profoundly shaped the history of HIV/ AIDS. Unfortunately Ruth’s archive does not tell us much about the impact of the AIDS epidemic on Black people in Arkansas. However, our study of Ruth’s memoir and archival fragments builds on Cherisse Jones-Branch and Gary Edwards’ compelling model of biographical essays in Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times (2018) and Jayme Stone’s 2010 study of Black women as activist mothers in the Arkansas Delta.²⁷Cherisse Jones-Branch and Gary T. Edwards, eds., Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times, Southern Women: Their Lives and Times (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018); Jayme Millsap Stone, “‘They Were Her Daughters:’ Women and Grassroots Organizing for Social Justice in the Arkansas Delta, 1870–1970” (Memphis, TN, University of Memphis, 2010), https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1238&context=etd. Our examination of the richness and limits of Ruth’s archive expands on these authors’ approach of using various sources to demonstrate women's diverse and multifaceted historical roles.

If contested understandings and expectations of gender run through Ruth’s memoir and archives, and the discrimination experienced by many of the men she cared for, Arkansas’s enduring racial divisions implicitly shaped her narrative and its silences. In the words of Catherine Fosl and Daniel Vivian, “the same race, gender, and class divides that mark US society are evident within LGBTQ communities, making histories of queer people of color, women, and trans people more difficult to access, especially by those who do not identify as such.”²⁸Catherine Fosl and Daniel Vivian, “Investigating Kentucky’s LBGTQ Heritage: Subaltern Stories from the Bluegrass State,” The Public Historian 41, no. 2 (2019): 221. Ongoing archival projects in Arkansas are beginning to address these histories. The Historical Research Center at the UAMS Library has collected and preserved the papers of Dr. Joycelyn Elders, Director of the Arkansas Department of Health (1987–1993) and Surgeon General of the United States (1993–1994), who played an important role in the AIDS epidemic both in Arkansas and nationally.

To understand Ruth’s story—and what her archives and cemetery mean for queer memory in the southern United States—we must address how Ruth embraced and struggled against an ideal of “southern femininity” in the 1980s and early 1990s. Ruth’s memoir is a record of the constricted gender expectations imposed on her and her strategic use of her identity to help the men for whom she cared. In her 1991 essay, Frances Ross provides a formative background on changing notions of femininity and how women addressed social problems in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Arkansas.²⁹Frances Mitchell Ross, "The New Woman as Club Woman and Social Activist in Turn of the Century Arkansas," The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 50, no. 4 (1991): 317–351. These norms remained decades later, as Anna Zajicek, Allyn Lord, and Lori Holyfield argue in their article on the women’s movement in northwest Arkansas: “To become activists in the civil rights movement, these women had to challenge the ideals of southern femininity and create a new sense of self.”³⁰Anna M. Zajicek, Allyn Lord, and Lori Holyfield, “The Emergence and First Years of a Grassroots Women’s Movement in Northwest Arkansas, 1970-1980,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2003): 155. Ruth also grappled with ideals of femininity while embracing the gendered role of caregiver.

In her memoirs and archival notes, Ruth does not directly discuss feminist politics in Arkansas. However, her complex experiences as a caregiver and activist contribute to what Janet Allured referred to as alternative “wellsprings” of “southern change-seekers” in her study of second-wave feminism in Louisiana.³¹Janet Allured, Remapping Second-Wave Feminism: The Long Women’s Rights Movement in Louisiana, 1950–1997 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 49. Moreover, when we examine Ruth’s experiences, it is vital to consider the historical context of Arkansas in the mid-1980s, a little over a decade after the intense political backlash against the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. As Janine Parry argues, “the Equal Rights Amendment in Arkansas had swiftly moved from being perceived by many observers as ‘virtually assured’ of ratification in January of 1973 to being openly reviled at the next legislative session.”³²Janine A. Parry, “‘What Women Wanted’: Arkansas Women’s Commissions and the ERA,” The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2000): 283. While distinct from Ruth's story, these conflicting political currents indirectly shaped her activism and experiences.  

Constructing Care Work and Motherhood in Arkansas

Ruth’s written and archival ephemera record the gendered expectations of care and motherhood  often imposed on women in late twentieth-century Arkansas. Her autobiography contains a steady commentary on the contested meaning of motherhood in her life and care work. The figures of abusive mothers, absent mothers, and idealized alternative mothers run throughout the book. Ruth’s deeply damaging mother and her own constant worries that she might cause her young daughter harm through her AIDS work are recurring themes.³³Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 100–102. Ruth’s memoir and archives contain glimpses of the range of substitute mothers these dying men sought, including Ruth, the Virgin Mary, and even Dolly Parton.

As mentioned, Ruth's career as an informal caregiver in the mid-1980s began with a case of mistaken maternal identity. With only a few exceptions, the men's families for whom Ruth provided care rejected their sick and dying sons.³⁴Garofalo, “Lessons in Love.” “So many arrived [back in Arkansas] thinking Mama would take them back. Sometimes I would go to their homes with them, mostly just to save me a trip of driving back out there when she wouldn’t.”³⁵Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 55.

Alongside this parade of neglectful parents, another narrative of idealized mother figures runs through Ruth’s life history and archives. A letter she wrote to Dolly Parton on August 20, 1993, on behalf of Billy Ray Collins soon after he died, fashioned the beloved country music singer as a substitute maternal figure for the dead man. Ruth wrote the letter thanking Dolly for a picture that she had sent to Billy, a devoted fan. “Billy’s mother never saw the picture or even knew that you had sent it,” the letter begins “You see, Billy’s mother wouldn’t come in his last days. . . . Billy was crushed.” Ruth's letter underlined a profound sense of loneliness: “But in the end, even his friends stopped coming by to see him. They just couldn’t take it. His lover, Paul, and I were the only ones there in the last weeks and minutes of his life, except for you.” Ultimately, Ruth had to tell the dying Billy that his mother would not visit him. “I finally told him that his mother wasn’t coming but that I would be there with him as would Paul. And that he would not die alone. All he said was ‘and Dolly’.” In Ruth’s memory of Billy’s final days, recorded in a letter to Parton, a photograph of the singer was transformed into an icon standing in for Billy’s absent mother.³⁶See, Box 6, Folder 16, Ruth Coker Burks papers, Center for Arkansas History and Culture, Little Rock, Arkansas. Billy was certainly not the only one of Ruth’s guys to reach out for their mothers and be denied at the end of their lives. This is a recurring theme in Ruth’s memoir.

This search for an alternative maternal figure is perhaps best exemplified by Ruth’s visits with the men she cared for to that most idealized, and unrealizable, of mothers: the Virgin Mary. They often visited a small grotto at St. Mary of the Springs Catholic Church in Hot Springs. “There’s a statue of the Virgin Mary there,” writes Ruth, “in a red-brick shrine, hidden from the street. She’s on a pedestal, so she looks down on you, but there’s kindness in the stone of her eyes.  . . . Whatever their religion, or lack thereof, my guys often like to visit her . . . sit on the brick and talk to her.”³⁷Burks and O’Leary, 232.

All the Young Men

At the heart of Ruth’s memoir, and of recent criticisms of her memory, are the men, including Chip and Billy, who she cared for and those she later buried, such as Jimmy, in the Files Cemetery. Who were the titular ‘young men’ of Ruth’s autobiography, or as some of her critics lament, the lost ‘forty names’ of the Files Cemetery?³⁸Gelder, “Ruth Coker Burks and the Missing Monument.”

Based on Ruth’s account, she cared for hundreds of men dealing with HIV/AIDS in central Arkansas from 1986 to 1995.³⁹Garofalo, “Lessons in Love”; Koon, “Ruth Coker Burks: The Cemetery Angel”; Burks, "All Her Sons: The Cemetery Angel.” The ashes of a small number of them are interred in the Files Cemetery. These men had returned to Arkansas in search of care after living in New York or Washington, DC, or when they had left more rural parts of the state for Hot Springs or Little Rock. In Ruth’s telling, many of these young men only reluctantly returned to Arkansas for care that their families denied them.⁴⁰Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 30–31, 76–77. “My guy who made it all the way to DC,” wrote Ruth upon visiting Chip’s grave, “only to end up in the place he’d escaped from.”⁴¹Burks and O’Leary, 343.

She cared for primarily working-class (sometimes indigent) young white and Latino men. Specifically, Ruth’s memoir, archives, and interviews record her work with numerous white country boys from the hills of Arkansas, Mexican immigrants in Hot Springs, and working-class drag queens. Many came from Mount Ida, Dardanelle, and other rural towns in central Arkansas.⁴²Burks and O’Leary, 148–149, 165–167. Exemplifying this, Ruth’s beloved Billy, a luminescent drag queen, was “the movie star from Dardanelle.”⁴³Burks and O’Leary, 166. Her guys included everyone from Jim, her first patient; to Tim Gentry, “a hillbilly dandy”; to Roger, whose family tried to wash away his sins in a creek baptism; and to the aforementioned Billy, the charismatic drag queen from Dardanelle who prominently featured in many newspaper profiles of Ruth and her book.⁴⁴Koon, “Ruth Coker Burks: The Cemetery Angel”; Matthew Kincanon, “Ruth Coker Burks Describes Her Lifetime Caring for AIDS Patients to the Gonzaga Community,” The Gonzaga Bulletin, March 1, 2017, https://www.gonzagabulletin.com/news/ruth-coker-burks-describes-her-lifetime-caring-for-aids-patients-to-the-gonzaga-community/article_0e5de906-fdeb-11e6-b294-d72df02858f2.html; Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 70. They also included men from Mexico who worked in tree planting or at the Hot Springs racetrack Oaklawn Park, including Angel Mestizo, whom Ruth recounts assisting as he simultaneously sought medical care and to avoid deportation.⁴⁵Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 274–277. The marginalized status of many of these men led them to Ruth, who, as she frequently reminds her readers and interviewers, lacked any formal medical training. As Paul Wineland, Billy's former partner, notes in the 2014 StoryCorps interview, "You were the only person that we could call. There wasn’t a doctor. There wasn’t a nurse. There wasn’t anyone. It was just you."⁴⁶Garofalo, “Lessons in Love.”

Occasionally, Ruth did comment on the class divisions. She provided concise descriptions in her efforts to keep her childhood friend, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, informed about the AIDS epidemic: “But I knew he didn’t know the gay men I saw—the poor, the rejected, the ones with nobody to care for them.”⁴⁷Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 92. In discussing a professional ballet dancer whose partner came home to die in Arkansas, Ruth described “this ballet dancer who seemed so out of place and of a different class than the Hot Springs guys.” Ruth remembers the drag queens she saw at Our House in Hot Springs as goddesses who transformed the city. “The performers came and went  . . . It was like Dynasty, but that was absurd because we were in Arkansas, which meant these people didn’t have the means to have a fabulous life. But there they were in fabulous gowns.  . . . They were goddesses. The idea that I could breeze by someone like this in Hot Springs.”⁴⁸Burks and O’Leary, 161, 267.

Not all of the men lacked political or social connections. Chip exemplifies this. While he was from Glenwood, which Ruth described as “one county over from Hot Springs and about forty years behind,” Chip had enjoyed a rising career working for the Democratic Party in Washington, DC. Chip lived with Ruth and her daughter for a few weeks, and she cared for him as he died.⁴⁹Burks and O’Leary, 230, 233–235. This simultaneous intensity and brevity helps explain some of the gaps in her detailed knowledge of these men: “I felt at home, yet still at a distance from what these men were going through.”⁵⁰Burks and O’Leary, 53. Ruth often provided daily care for weeks or months before their families sometimes stepped in for their last few days of life.⁵¹Burks and O’Leary, 260–266.

While Arkansas was the site of flight and reluctant return in Ruth’s memoir, Hot Springs served as a refuge for many rural gay men. At the gay bar Our House, “almost all the regulars had left their hometowns to create their own lives here in Hot Springs.”⁵²Burks and O’Leary, 5, 37, 166. For a fuller queer history of Arkansas, see Brock Thompson, The Un-Natural State: Arkansas and the Queer South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2010).

If Hot Springs was a refuge, the Files Cemetery emerged as a site for queer memory. Flagging the commemorative importance of this small cemetery, Ruth says “I wanted them to be counted, to have their lives matter, and I wanted them to have control over their destinies, no matter how limited they might seem to others. If I felt they were strong enough, I brought them to Files Cemetery and asked them to tell me where they’d like to be buried.”⁵³Burks and O’Leary, 58.

A significant challenge of working with Ruth's archives and autobiography is the enduring ambiguities surrounding the number of cremations interred in the Files Cemetery either by her from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, or in the following years as the cemetery became informally associated with LGBTQ+ memory in Arkansas. Estimates of the number of men whose ashes Ruth interred range from five to approximately forty. In her early interview with StoryCorps, Ruth stated, "I’ve buried over forty people in my family’s cemetery because their families didn’t want them."⁵⁴Garofalo, “Lessons in Love.” As one longtime resident of Hot Springs, Tim Looper, notes, there are five identifiable graves of men who died during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and he remembers explicitly going to six funerals there.⁵⁵Kacala, “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men.” Ruth has long maintained that dozens of other cremations have been interred at Files; she mentions fifteen names in her memoir. She insists that given the passage of time and her health problems, she does not remember the names of all the men she cared for.⁵⁶Koon, “Ruth Coker Burks: The Cemetery Angel”; Kacala, “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men.” Moreover, she claims that initially in the 1980s, she concealed what she was doing in the Files Cemetery so that those who would have opposed burying abandoned people associated with AIDS there would not find out.⁵⁷Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 27–28. Further complicating the matter, Ruth claims that she started to receive anonymous ashes in the mail once she was interviewed about HIV/AIDS in local news outlets, and she proceeded to inter these ashes as well.⁵⁸Burks and O’Leary, 133–136. Finally, the ashes of people Ruth did not know personally have also been interred at Files, as it became a potent space of LGBTQ+ memory. During an August 2020 visit to the cemetery, Ruth noticed a recently added memorial to a queer-identifying young man whom she had never met.

Ambiguity, anonymity, and informality have been central elements of Ruth's work from the beginning. In response to praise during her StoryCorps interview, Ruth said, "You know, they always say 'fake it ‘til you make it,' and I faked my way through the whole thing. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know anything."⁵⁹Garofalo, “Lessons in Love.” Respecting the anonymity of many men is central to Ruth's understanding. "I'd go to an apartment to bring food, and another man would be there,” she writes. "There were people I recognized, though I pretended not to know anything about them."⁶⁰Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 97–98. Ruth's publisher noted in 2021, "Many of the men Ruth helped and eventually buried approached her asking for anonymity due to not wanting to be outed."⁶¹Kacala, “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men.”

The cemetery is a throughline in Ruth's memoirs and interviews. She returns to this commemorative geography at the end of All the Young Men as she narrates the journey from Rogers, in the northwestern corner of Arkansas, where she currently lives, back to her hometown of Hot Springs. “I make my way, finally, to Files Cemetery. The carpet of pine needles crunches under my feet as I make the rounds. The mockingbirds still caw above me. I clear brush here and there on the graves, saying hi to Misty before walking over to see Angel, Carlos, and Antonio.”⁶²Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 344. Alongside its status as a refuge and commemorative space, the cemetery is a site of considerable pain for Ruth, not only in terms of the family conflict that resulted in her contested ownership of many cemetery plots and the memory of the men she buried there, but also the more recent debates over what she did (or did not do) in caring for them.

Ruth's Fragmentary Archive

There are scattered, evocative references to Ruth’s archival materials throughout All the Young Men, whether to her pink leather daybook or to the collection of newspaper clippings related to her successful efforts to mobilize the Downtown Merchants Association of Hot Springs for Worlds AIDS Day on December 1, 1993.⁶³Burks and O’Leary, 154, 337, 339. Her fragmentary archive complements recent public history scholarship on queer history and memory in rural areas of the United States. For example, a 2019 special issue on “Commemorating Queer History" in The Public Historian explored how museum exhibits and historical sites, especially in smaller towns and more rural areas, engage queer history.⁶⁴See Rebecca Bush, “Woman, Southern, Bisexual: Interpreting Ma Rainey and Carson McCullers in Columbus, Georgia,” The Public Historian 41, no. 2 (2019): 94–115; Christopher Hommerding, “Queer Public History in Small-Town Wisconsin: The Pendarvis Historic Site and Interpreting the Queer Past,” The Public Historian 41, no. 2 (2019): 70–93; Fosl and Vivian, “Investigating Kentucky’s LBGTQ Heritage.” As Christopher Hommerding argues, such histories in non-urban areas “[give] lie to the notion that queerness outside of urban centers was historically hidden, invisible, and cut off from queers in other locations.”⁶⁵Hommerding, “Queer Public History in Small-Town Wisconsin,” 73. Moreover, public historians such as Fosl and Vivian have foregrounded the challenge of “an uneven, often spare historical record” and the need for “better geographic representation” of queer histories in southern spaces.⁶⁶Fosl and Vivian, “Investigating Kentucky’s LBGTQ Heritage,” 221–222.

In 2022, Ruth donated her archival materials to the Center for Arkansas History and Culture (CAHC) in two batches. The first, more significant donation of materials primarily consisted of biographical and professional information, including planners, personal writing, news clippings, Christmas cards, and scattered photographs from Ruth’s activism and travels in the 1990s. This also included ephemera such as AIDS education t-shirts, drag ball gowns (one of which Ruth wore to Bill Clinton’s first inaugural ball), and the final pottery urn from Dryden Pottery that Ruth never used. The second, smaller donation comprised photo albums, newspapers, magazines, and All the Young Men publication materials. We wish that Ruth had kept better records, but this is the regrettable reality of many archives. Perhaps a better question than why Ruth did not keep better records is what this rich, if incomplete, archive can tell us about the history of HIV/AIDS.

Ruth’s daily planners illustrate the simultaneously rich and fragmentary nature of the collection. The planners in the archival collection include more blank pages than written ones, with some pages marked with only a single name. These fragmentary entries are mundane, a day-to-day account of an individual woman’s hopes and fears. Many are simple notes or reminders, the importance and context coming from either conversation with Ruth or other external sources.

Ruth’s archive reveals what it must have felt like in those difficult early years when she claims she primarily acted alone. As she puts it in the epilogue of her autobiography, “There was no one behind me. I had no choice but to help them.”⁶⁷Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 343. David Koon began his 2015 profile of Ruth in the Arkansas Times as “one lonely person” attempting to “budge the vast stone wheel of apathy.”⁶⁸Koon, “Ruth Coker Burks: The Cemetery Angel.” This theme of isolation and hostility runs throughout her memoir. As Ruth notes of one church supper, other parishioners “eyed me suspiciously, but they always eyed me suspiciously, even before I was the town pariah.”⁶⁹Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 152.

But Ruth was not the only individual caring for AIDS patients in central Arkansas. All the Young Men can be read as a record of “the town elders” of Hot Springs who quietly assisted her. This is best exemplified by Clay Farrar, a prominent Hot Springs lawyer. Clay introduced Ruth to a network of Rotary Clubs where she spoke about her care work and AIDS activism and connected with prominent men who were willing to provide support quietly. Several bankers in Hot Springs occasionally assisted Ruth with monetary donations or by requesting favors in the medical profession.⁷⁰Burks and O’Leary, 182–184, 257–258.

Certainly, a range of individuals and non-profits attempted to help those dealing with HIV/AIDS in Arkansas in the 1980s and early 1990s; however, Ruth’s searing memory but factual inaccuracy in insisting that she acted alone evokes the experience of the HIV/AIDS epidemic for the men she cared for, many of whom—working class, indigent, and abandoned—were from the hills of Arkansas or were Mexican immigrants far from their families. These men were on society’s margins in multiple abject ways. As Ruth describes visiting Angel in the hospital, “Angel and I smiled at each other, together in our lonely place.”⁷¹Burks and O’Leary, 277.

This sense of isolation is also represented in Ruth’s archival materials, for instance, in two poems she wrote in the early 1990s, “Shades of Black” and “THIRTYONE.” In writing about her first patient, Jimmy, in “Shades of Black,” the death Ruth recalls is sudden and lonely; there is only Ruth and a dying man crying out for his absent mother. Ruth went into the room alone, held this man’s hand, watched him die, and walked out of the hospital room alone. “Remembering the day that brought me here. He was the first one who just died. Right then, right there. I walked into his room, he took my hand, he nodded and then he died.”⁷²See, Box 6, Folder 16, Ruth Coker Burks papers, Center for Arkansas History and Culture, Little Rock, Arkansas.

In “THIRTYONE,” the sense of isolation is deployed in anger against society and religious institutions. Ruth writes: “He’s 31 and dying of a disease that not so long ago was God’s revenge, punishment for THEM. While Ruth was sharply critical of the hostility of many religious institutions in Arkansas from the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, she remembers her care work and activism relative to her religious faith. As she has repeated in conversations with us, “I never lost my faith; I just lost faith in everyone else’s faith.”⁷³See, Box 6, Folder 16, Ruth Coker Burks papers, Center for Arkansas History and Culture, Little Rock, Arkansas.  

Criticism in Context

In time, media coverage of Ruth shifted from the laudatory into two overarching criticisms. First, Ruth either kept shoddy records of the men whose ashes she interred in the Files Cemetery or was guilty of exaggerating the number she cared for or buried. Second, she has either been unwilling or unable to put up a monument to these men at the Files Cemetery despite advocating for a memorial for years. Some of her critics suggest that a successful GoFundMe campaign (to raise money for a cemetery memorial and Ruth’s medical bills) was entirely used for the latter purpose and not for the former. For example, in a 2021 piece, the Arkansas Times journalist Austin Gelder discussed how there was not yet a memorial, local disappointment in the limited impact of Ruth’s newfound celebrity on Hot Springs, and debates over ownership and oversight of the Files Cemetery. In a subsequent piece for NBC News, Alexander Kacala expanded on these concerns over funding, management of the Files Cemetery, and local disappointment (and anger.) Kacala also suggested that Ruth may have exaggerated or even fictionalized some of her claims, particularly regarding the number of men for whom she cared.⁷⁴Kacala, “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men.” It is important to note that in late 2022, Ruth arranged for a monument to be constructed and delivered to the Files Cemetery.

As Gelder notes, most of her critics still “commend Burks . . . [and] don’t want to detract from her good deeds” while insisting on clarity.⁷⁵Gelder, “Ruth Coker Burks and the Missing Monument.” In turn, Kacala surmises that beyond the good deeds that Ruth did in the 1980s and early 1990s, “over the years either she or the media have sensationalized the story for some sort of gain.”⁷⁶Kacala, “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men.” Some in Hot Springs are more critical, including Robert Klintworth, a former friend of Ruth who cared for the Files Cemetery for many years (Klintworth provides much of the criticism in both the Arkansas Times and NBC News pieces). Klintworth claims he and his partner, Paul Wineland (who was Billy's partner before his death), cared for the cemetery and provided Ruth with significant assistance in remembering details and names for her book, but that the rewards of the “book deal, a movie deal, and international recognition” have accrued to Ruth alone.⁷⁷Gelder, “Ruth Coker Burks and the Missing Monument.” Paul Wineland was also central to the 2014 StoryCorp profile, which fed the media's interest on Ruth’s story.

Along with Klintworth, Tim Looper cared for the cemetery for several years after 2015. Looper also is one of Ruth’s prominent local critics, and has argued that Ruth exaggerated her narrative and/or does not remember events accurately.⁷⁸Kacala, “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men.” Looper maintains, for instance, that Ruth’s first hospital visit occurred in Hot Springs and not in Little Rock, as she writes in her memoir. According to Ruth, some local drag troupes have also provided informal care for the cemetery. In 2023, Hot Springs resident Jim Thompson began to care for the seemingly neglected cemetery, as reported by the local news.⁷⁹Rolly Hoyt, “One Man’s Mission Helps Restore a Site of Arkansas Cemetery Holding Remains of AIDS Victims,” THV 11, October 26, 2023, https://www.thv11.com/article/news/local/arkansas-files-cemetery-aids-restoration/91-39e9dad1-7ece-4244-b854-4e1d2091c5bc.

A June 2024 YouTube video podcast, RUTHLESS: The Real Story Behind the ‘Cemetery Angel of Arkansas’ alleges to uncover the “scam” perpetrated by the “grifter” Burks. The three-hour video is a sensational retelling of the 2021 Arkansas Times article. Looper is the principal source and the recurrent themes include the alleged exploitation of gay deceased men for fame and fortune, the accusation of profiting from a never-constructed (but since built) memorial, the flagging of factual errors and inconsistencies in the memoir, Ruth’s alleged failure to recognize other individuals and entities who provided aid, and a general sense that her version of events has disparaged Hot Springs and Arkansas. Posted comments about the video are overwhelmingly critical of Ruth, but it is beyond the scope of this article to evaluate these claims.

The CAHC is working to process Ruth's and others' archival papers from these years. However, it would take a large research budget (and a significant scholarly team) to, 1) carefully and responsibly reconstruct the life histories of the men buried in the Files Cemetery, 2) locate the interred cremations within the Files Cemetery with both precision and respect for anonymity, and 3) carefully and empathetically adjudicate the conflicting claims by drawing on state and local records. Complicating any research efforts is the reality that almost all of the direct witnesses of what Ruth did are long dead, and the remaining few include both fervent supporters and biting critics. These conflicting accounts rely on individual memories of traumatic events that occurred at least thirty years ago.

Many of the critiques voiced in newspaper articles and videos are valid. We too would like to know more about the men's life histories and see the Files Cemetery physically transformed into the commemorative site it already is in the minds of so many. In telling and retelling Ruth's story, it is clear that many details and claims remain constant, alongside some ambiguities and exaggerations. Ruth is not necessarily the appropriate target for all of these legitimate concerns. Or to reframe Kacala’s observation as a question, if elements of Ruth’s story have been ‘sensationalized’ over the years, to what end have they been sensationalized for a reading public in Arkansas and beyond?

Our preliminary research suggests that the presentation of Ruth as an almost saintly figure began with the 2014 StoryCorps interview and the 2015 Arkansas Times profile. In the StoryCorps interview, Michael Garofalo notes, "Ruth is one of those rare people who doesn’t run away from suffering. She runs toward it without hesitation."⁸⁰Garofalo, “Lessons in Love.” David Koon’s article in the Arkansas Times in 2015 was titled, “Ruth Coker Burks, the Cemetery Angel.” A photograph of Ruth overlayed with the text, “St. Ruth,” was the cover story of the initial print edition (the “St. Ruth” title was removed from the online version). It was more often in the headlines of stories, rather than in the body of articles, that she was presented in saintly or angelic terms.

These binary understandings of Ruth, either as a living saint and the Arkansas cemetery angel, or as a fantasist and teller of tall tales, do not map onto the reality of her evocative and fragmentary archive. Returning to the questions we posed at the beginning of this article, what can Ruth’s archive tell us about the history of the AIDS epidemic in Arkansas and the construction of the role of the idealized caregiver for some Arkansas women at the time?

One answer that her archive does provide is that contestation and debate have long been integral to Ruth's care work and activism and that she has always had both enthusiastic supporters and harsh critics. Based on newspaper clippings from her archival donation, the criticism of Ruth and her work began in the early 1990s. In a 1993 letter to the editor published in the Sentinel-Record (Hot Springs, AR) that echoes some of the later criticism, the author states that Ruth “claims too much credit . . . her statistics are out of this world,” and that Ruth made AIDS patients stand out in the cold during a World AIDS Day service. Other local newspaper pieces saved by Ruth from the early 1990s had less to do with Ruth herself and instead reflected rampant prejudice against gay men. An undated letter to the editor states that the author is withdrawing their membership to the Downtown Merchants Association of Hot Springs due to the Association’s support of AIDS Awareness Day since, in the words of the outraged author, “AIDS is a behaviorally transmitted disease and does not need awareness or anything other than saying 'no' to homosexual activity or drug use. How much does it cost to teach that?”⁸¹See, Box 6, Folder 2, Ruth Coker Burks papers, Center for Arkansas History and Culture, Little Rock, Arkansas.

Criticisms of Ruth are not the only subject of the news clippings that she assiduously collected. There are several undated articles praising Ruth and her work. These positive assessments from the early 1990s foreshadow the recent praise of Ruth's care work and activism. One letter by Robert Gale (the vice-president of Helping People with AIDS) refuted the claim that Ruth was not the executive director of HPWA, and praised her efforts in that role. At least two articles in Ruth’s collection mention her professional work at her day job at Prudential Lakefront Real Estate.

Ruth’s archival collection includes a binder of letters of recommendation and typed endorsements from prominent citizens regarding Ruth’s nomination for the Arkansas Community Service Award, the establishment of an HIV/AIDS program at Levi Hospital, and the nomination of Ruth for the position of Executive Director of the Arkansas AIDS Foundation. These letters provide further evidence of the sustained care work that she offered. For example, a local attorney wrote that “Ruth has demonstrated her commitment to the care of those who are HIV positive, and we are fortunate to have someone already in the community who is prepared to immediately take on such a responsibility.”⁸²See, Box 6, Folder 20, Ruth Coker Burks papers, Center for Arkansas History and Culture, Little Rock, Arkansas.

The testimony of some of Ruth’s critics lends credence to her sustained, if controversial, presence. Kacala includes an extended quote from Hot Springs resident Daymon Jones, a long time survivor of the AIDS epidemic in Hot Springs, who is harshly critical of Ruth. In Jones’ own words, “I have contempt for her … She makes it look like my town was hostile to people with HIV. It’s the fact that she has used that stereotype to portray my town and my community as something horrible and that was not the story.” Jones was particularly annoyed at what he saw as Ruth’s pushy methods in attempting to provide him with unwanted help. Again, in Jones’s own terms, “What really got me riled up [was] how she does it. . . . She said, ‘Well you know I can bury you, too, when you die.’ Well Ruth, I have no intention of dying right now, and even if I do, I have a family cemetery. ‘They won’t let you in, you know that.’ Oh yes they will. We discussed this already. She tried to use fear to make herself look like she was somebody that was going to help.”⁸³Kacala, “Doubts Surround Viral Story of ‘AIDS Angel’ Who Says She Helped Hundreds of Dying Men.

Jones’ comments clearly illustrates that some people living with AIDS in Hot Springs found Ruth’s efforts unnecessary and even offensive. At the same time, the anecdote also suggests that by the early 1990s, Ruth was locally well-known for AIDS-related activism and care work and that she regularly discussed her cemetery as a possible final resting place for those excluded elsewhere.

Conclusion

What can we make of the competing media narratives depicting this individual woman to be either a saint, selflessly salving the wounds of AIDS patients, or a sinner, exaggerating what she did and pocketing the cash? We want to argue that the legitimate anger aimed at the incomplete historical record of these men's lives and the decaying state of their final resting place is standing in for a much larger problem—the terrible treatment accorded those dealing with HIV/AIDS in Arkansas in the 1980s and 1990s by many medical institutions, by civil society, by their families, and by religious congregations. As Ruth put it, with hopefulness, “if I sound the alarm . . . the cavalry will come.”⁸⁴Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 183. Yet the cavalry never arrived, at least for many of the men for whom Ruth cared. These conclusions are born out in the two persistent emotions that weave their way throughout her story: her searing anger at the failure of others to not do more, and her deep, enduring love for these men whom she often only knew briefly at the very end of their lives. This echoes Harris’s influential analysis of the role of a range of emotions in Black women activists' perspective on their AIDS activism, especially the entanglement of love, compassion, and solidarity with frustration and anger.⁸⁵Harris, “Emotions, Feelings, and Social Change,” 191–195.

Maybe this rush to canonize or vilify Ruth is an effort to displace this broader societal failure. Suppose Ruth was an angelic caregiver for those dying of AIDS. In that case, it absolves all those in Arkansas (and elsewhere) who either did nothing or actively discriminated against gay men. In turn, if Ruth was an imperfect record keeper with a shaky memory, she could become the target of all the legitimate anger of how these men were treated in life and death.

The archive of Ruth’s life, activism, and care work, and its fragments offers a much more sobering history of AIDS in Arkansas: a colossal tragedy and a systemic failure. Not a failure on the part of Ruth or the other individuals who, at a tremendous personal sacrifice, helped those dealing with HIV/AIDS, but rather a systemic failure on the part of many medical institutions, state government, and civil society. Returning at the very end of her autobiography to the very beginning of her story (when she walked into Jimmy’s hospital room in Little Rock in 1986), Ruth puts it a different way: “The question I get most, the one I hate, is why I went into his room. And why I helped people. Again and again . . . the answer is, How could I not? The real question is, How could you not?”⁸⁶Burks and O’Leary, All the Young Men, 345.

Ultimately, it is not a question of what Ruth Coker Burks did (or did not do) to become the Arkansas Cemetery Angel, but rather what the depictions of Ruth as an angel and a saint in print and the media reveals about the memory (and continuing reality) of AIDS in Arkansas. At its most potent, Ruth's memoir and archives—alongside the Files Cemetery—not only illustrate the deep commitment of one inspiring individual, however imperfect, to help those suffering at society's margins, but also provide a glimpse into the lives of the men she cared for, whether in documenting their loneliness, their heroic efforts to live as long as they could, or in their fashioning of substitute mothers and chosen family.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Nathan Marvin, Marta Cieslak, and David Baylis for their encouragement, generous feedback, and insights that contributed to the development of this article.

About the Authors

Andrew Amstutz is an assistant professor of history at Queens College, CUNY. He has published articles in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Philological Encounters, and South Asia. Prior to joining Queens College, he taught at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. 

Jess Porter is executive director of the Center for Arkansas History and Culture, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's archive. He is a geographer and former chair of UALR's history department. 

Phoenix Smithey is the head of special collections and university archivist at the University of Central Arkansas. Smithey is active with the Academy of Certified Archivists, the Society of Southwest Archivists, and the Arkansas Humanities Council. She teaches in the fields of archival management and archival preservation.

Like most listeners, I'm sure, what I love best about S-Town is McLemore's irrepressible character and voice. McLemore was an antique horologist and self-described "semi-homosexual" who lived in Bibb County, Alabama, outside the small town of Woodstock. However, although Woodstock is only about thirty miles equidistant from the metropolitan centers of both Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, Alabama's largest city, the podcast deceptively portrays the area as excessively rural and remote. That deception not only gets this part of Alabama wrong, but also perpetuates a longstanding stereotype of the whole South as generally disconnected from the modern world, culturally and geographically. I should confess here that I am ultimately not a fan of S-Town, and this portrayal is just part of the reason why.

Nevertheless, McLemore's unique story still offers a rich opportunity to examine the complex dynamics of sexuality, gender, race, and class at the fringes of the more familiar, metronormative centers of urban queer life. McLemore was a paranoid genius, with the rare ability to see and explain all the invisible connections between his immediate locality and the global forces of capitalism, inequality, war, and environmental degradation currently destroying the planet. Sadly, in addition to other likely causes, including the mercury poisoning he probably contracted from his work on antique clocks, McLemore's paranoia drove him to suicide on June 15, 2015. This loss makes me doubly grateful that Brian Reed, S-Town's creator and narrator, decided to share McLemore's voice with millions of listeners. In a time when so many people happily treat every new music video, online commentary, Presidential tweet, and podcast like S-Town as a revolutionary event, McLemore resists any easy classification or commodification and shows us, instead, the real precarity and messiness of what it means to be human, as well as queer and southern, in the twenty-first century.

In her excellent article about S-Town, Monique Rooney examines the way that McLemore's untimely "voice from beyond the grave" combines with the "intermedia" of other texts and objects within the podcast—including "clocks and sundials," the "elaborate hedge maze that John created, unrecorded conversations, letters, a novel and other print narratives, poetry, songs, film, e-mails, Google maps, theatrical rituals, tattoos and tattooing, texts messages and graffiti"—to create a queerly alternative sense of time that works within and against the linear structure of the overarching narrative form.²Monique Rooney, "Queer Objects and Intermedial Timepieces: Reading S-town," Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 23, no. 1 (2018): 157. This intermedial structure of text and paratext, she argues, "opens the listener to wider networks and spheres" beyond "John's relentlessly caustic and negative views of life in the American South" and offers McLemore himself as "an intermediary" who "confound[s] . . . established hierarches and conventional subject/object relations," especially in terms of temporality, region, and sexuality.³Rooney, 159.

While there's no denying the power of McLemore's voice, I believe that the podcast ultimately restricts that power by constraining it within the closed temporal field of the podcast's strictly sequential form. Although Rooney argues that "S-Town's queerly intermedial form counteracts its ends-driven sequential form and its death-driven themes," the podcast's relentless push toward narrative resolution still wins out.⁴Rooney, 157, original emphasis. Moreover, while McLemore's recorded voice may be coming "from beyond the grave," his death still means that he can never speak out after the podcast to confront its selective portrayal of him. McLemore is endlessly complex, yet he will never be more complex than the narrative allows. This containment helps explain how he has become a figure of so much public fascination: like any dead celebrity, he can never finally reassert his subjectivity in a way that might change our perceptions and fantasies about him. And this restrictive framework is what frustrates me most about S-Town, for I know that I can never fully separate the McLemore I have come to like from the McLemore that Reed has edited for us.

Other reviewers have challenged Reed's serious ethical problem of seeming to exploit McLemore's death for creative and financial gain.⁵Jessica Goudeau, "Was the Art of S-Town Worth the Pain? How a Decades-Old Literary Argument Adds Insight to the Debate over the Popular Nonfiction Podcast," The Atlantic, April 9, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/was-the-art-of-s-town-worth-the-pain/522366/; Aja Romano, "S-Town is a stunning podcast. It probably shouldn't have been made," Vox, April 1, 2017, https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/3/30/15084224/s-town-review-controversial-podcast-privacy. Around the same time that plans for a movie adaptation were announced in June 2018, McLemore's estate filed suit against the makers of the podcast for violating his "rights of publicity."⁶EJ Dickson, "Judge Allows Lawsuit to Proceed Against 'S-Town' Podcast Makers," Rolling Stone, March 25, 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/s-town-lawsuit-john-mclemore-estate-812965/. But I want to consider another ethical concern in the way that Reed manipulates McLemore's voice to produce a certain effect—or rather, affect—for his listeners. Even as S-Town lets us experience McLemore's unusual character directly, this story of his troubled genius and premature death packages his character in a way that implicitly makes us, the listeners, feel different from him, no matter how much we might personally identify with him. As narrator, Reed uses McLemore to imagine a pleasanter, happier type of subjectivity, fashioning himself as a model liberal subject—not necessarily liberal in the pedestrian sense, although he does that too, but in the sense of being a self-contained, autonomous individual who appears, unlike McLemore, more or less separate from, and unaffected by, all the disciplinary and controlling forces of society. In addition, the podcast invites listeners to identify with Reed's narrative voice, eventually sharing his feelings of transcendent mobility and sophistication in opposition to the pain and paranoia that we hear in McLemore. Reed's aural embodiment of this liberal subject position promises listeners a similar sense of freedom and survival in a world of heightened global uncertainty—the forces that McLemore constantly railed against.

This buffering effect is, I think, another part of what gives S-Town its widespread appeal. Of course, it's not necessarily bad or unusual that a creative work would help us find this sense of pathos and security in a troubled world. But what I don't like is the way that Reed creates this affect by figuratively sacrificing McLemore to a worn narrative of southern gothic dysfunction. To create this twenty-first-century subjectivity that seems to transcend place, S-Town traps McLemore hopelessly and eternally in the place that he calls Shittown, Alabama. Although Reed ends the podcast with the story of McLemore's birth, S-Town buries him forever at the clichéd, lonely crossroads of a tragically (never happily) queer and backwards South. And in doing so, no matter what else the podcast might tell us about the real-life experience of being a queer, white, "semi-homosexual" man in semi-rural Alabama, this narrative framework reveals much more about the ideological uses served by mainstream imaginaries of southern queerness—fantasies of what it means to be queer and southern, southern and queer—in twenty-first-century US culture and beyond.⁷Brian Reed, "Chapter II: Has Anybody Called You?" March 28, 2017, in S-Town, produced by Brian Reed and Julie Snyder, podcast, MP3 audio, 44:22, https://stownpodcast.org/chapter/2. If any movie adaptation were to try to elicit the same kind of feeling in its viewers, I can't imagine it would be any less exploitative.

Policing the South

There's no denying S-Town's popularity. All seven episodes were made available for download on March 28, 2017, and since then tens of millions of listeners have followed Reed's account of McLemore's life and suicide. S-Town establishes itself, much like Reed's prior work, Serial, as a true-crime investigation. McLemore has asked Reed to investigate two things—an alleged murder and a case of alleged police corruption—and Reed sets to work combing the police reports and interviewing locals, although he didn't visit Alabama until a year later.

In Chapter I, Reed establishes a not-so-subtle conflation between Alabama and an imagined picture of the "South" as a whole. He does this in part by overstating the rurality of the setting. For example, Reed's description of where he stays on his first visit to Alabama invokes broader tropes of a sparsely populated, isolated landscape: "I had to leave Bibb County to find a hotel, so I'm in Bessemer, a small city about fifteen miles down the highway, where the far reaches of the Birmingham Metro Area dissolve into the rural counties like Bibb to the west. I'm at a Best Western just off the exit ramp, behind a Waffle House."⁸Brian Reed, "Chapter I: If You Keep Your Mouth Shut, You'll Be Surprised What You Can Learn," March 28, 2017, in S-Town, produced by Brian Reed and Julie Snyder, podcast, MP3 audio, 31:16, https://stownpodcast.org/chapter/1. While fifteen miles on an interstate highway hardly makes a marathon drive into the "far reaches" of civilization (and why does he have to "find" the hotel, as if the internet, a map, or McLemore himself, hadn't already told him where it was?), Reed effectively "dissolves" the specific landscape of Alabama into a more symbolic landscape of rural counties "like" Bibb whose generic southernness is made all the more evident by their common location "behind a Waffle House." 

In Chapter II, Reed determines that rumors about the murder McLemore asked Reed to investigate were exaggerated tales of a fight that occurred at a party "in the middle of the woods" in Tuscaloosa County.⁹Reed, "Chapter II," 22:48. Reed's attention to the fact that the fight took place in the woods once again occludes the proximity of Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. Reed mentions the quick arrival of the police and ambulance, as well as the nearness of a hospital where the alleged murderer Kabram Burt was taken to treat his injuries after the fight, and the fact that Burt called a friend in Bessemer, which is outside Birmingham, to pick him up at the hospital. Nevertheless, Reed gives the last word about the fight to Burt, who shrugs off the incident as the normal consequence of "liv[ing] like white trash and shit," and the rumors of murder as a normal consequence of living in "a damn small town, man."¹⁰Reed, "Chapter II," 26:43, 25:28. Although Reed essentially "solves" the crime for his listeners, he uses Burt's testimony to blur the scene of the crime with a broader notion of southern rurality. The fight might have happened anywhere in this imagined South, because the only spaces that matter here are a gossipy small town and a wooded landscape dominated by "white trash," not the more metropolitan adjacent spaces.

Construing the semi-rural setting of S-Town as excessively rural sets the stage for Reed's portrayal of McLemore as a queer loner who is similarly isolated, the apparent lawlessness of the place echoing the turbulent, anything-but-normal life of this particular inhabitant. And so, just after his explanation to McLemore about the fight, Reed quickly turns to the news of McLemore's suicide, even though in real time McLemore's death occurred several months after that conversation. Squeezing this sequence of events allows Reed to maintain the "true crime" format of the podcast, and he quickly sets to work exploring the details of McLemore's death and the fallout that ensues.

Thankfully, Reed is not entirely interested in solving the question of what finally led McLemore to take his own life. From a literary standpoint I am glad he didn't oversimplify things by trying to pin down a single, simple cause or motive. Based on this narrative open-endedness, I would agree with reviewer Katy Waldman that S-Town looks and sounds like a new kind of literary genre, what she calls "aural literature."¹¹Katy Waldman, "The Gorgeous New True Crime Podcast S-Town is Like Serial but Satisfying," Slate, March 30, 2017, http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/03/30/s_town_the_new_true_crime_podcast_by_the_makers_of_serial_reviewed.html. Yet, where she argues that this new kind of true-crime literature is "even more satisfying because [the case] always stays open," I believe that this feeling of audience satisfaction stems from something that is ideologically more dubious than open-endedness—and that shows how "aural literature" may not be so new after all. For all its novelty, and for all the ways that the podcast's intermedial elements stand "at odds with the sequential form," as Rooney writes, I find that this podcast has much in common with the traditional novel.¹²Rooney, 157. It deviates from the path of standard-fare detective stories and police procedurals, but detection and policing remain central to the narrative, both figuratively and structurally, thus replicating many of the discursive effects of discipline and control that literary critic D.A. Miller has identified in British novels of the Victorian era.¹³D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

Miller demonstrates how Victorian novels use narratives of policing and investigation to establish a covert model of self-policing and self-discipline for the unmarked, bourgeois center of society. These novels, he argues, set up a "scene" of criminality and/or social dysfunction (e.g., the slums of Victorian London) as a space that requires rigorous investigation. The narrative intrusion into this scene establishes its opposite. By going into a dysfunctional space and then withdrawing, the novel constructs and "repairs . . . normality" as a space "not needing the police or policelike detectives."¹⁴Miller, The Novel and the Police, 3. Moreover, this pattern defines the structure of the Victorian novel beyond tales of explicit crime and detection. To borrow the words from Dickens's novel Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), Miller adapts the work of Foucault to show how these texts "do the police in different voices," deploying all kinds of modes of discipline, surveillance, and constraint to make the reader a good, orderly subject for the sake of a stable, orderly society. In the narrative restoration of "normality," the protagonist (who, like Reed, is sometimes the narrator) is able to forget or disavow the "system of carceral restraints or disciplinary injunctions" that shape his subjectivity.¹⁵Miller, The Novel and the Police, x. And so, by way of our identification with that narrator/character, we readers can forget the disciplinary regimes that govern our "normality," too, because our implicit acquiescence to those regimes similarly means that no visible intervention or investigation is required. When the disciplinary structures of society seem most invisible, we liberal subjects feel like we're free of them.

In S-Town, following McLemore's lead, Reed constructs an imaginary, emphatically rural, and corrupt "Alabama" (as well as a wider "South") full of violence, racism, theft, and intrigue—exactly the kind of "scene" that requires this sort of literary "intrusiveness." Although the podcast starts with a specific investigation into the local circumstances of the alleged murder, Reed blurs that literal act of investigation with subtler forms of exposure and containment when he turns to McLemore's suicide, widening the scope of the figurative investigation beyond the local to McLemore's fraught position within sectional, national, and global contexts. In particular, I want to delve into two aspects of the podcast where Reed performs this novelistic policing: his treatment of Alabama racism and his treatment of McLemore's queerness. Both depictions construct Alabama and the wider South as a backwards, dysfunctional space in need of heavy policing, literally and figuratively. And it is through this clichéd sectional portrayal that we can most clearly understand how Reed exploits McLemore to construct this version of the liberal subject.

The Backwards South, Again

Thankfully, because this is a podcast delivered through sound, and not a written narrative, the power and originality of McLemore's voice constantly break through Reed's efforts to shape what we hear. But then S-Town squanders this opportunity by editing McLemore's voice to fit a more shopworn "southern" script. Like Jeeter Lester soaking his feet in the drainage ditch in Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road (1932), it doesn't take long before S-Town sinks into a stream of southern gothic clichés. Yes, Reed is following McLemore's cynical lead, but Reed seems even more insistent in portraying Shittown as backwards and corrupt and runs with McLemore's own comparison of Shittown to the "undercurrent of depravity" expressed in William Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" (1930).¹⁶Reed, "Chapter I," 32:50. And, even though Reed also mentions similar works by writers Guy de Maupassant and Shirley Jackson, he uses the Zombies' song inspired by "A Rose for Emily" as the closing music for every episode, underscoring connections between the podcast and southern gothic literature.¹⁷Literary critics David A. Davis and Gina Caison discuss these southern gothic tropes at length, including the comparison to Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily." Hear their excellent critique on the podcast "S02 Episode 3: Gilded Souths & S-Towns," July 20, 2017, in About South, produced by Gina Caison, Kelly Vines, and Adjoa Danso, podcast, MP3 audio, 38:27, https://soundcloud.com/about-south/s02-episode-3-gilded-souths-and-s-towns.

In later chapters, we learn that McLemore allegedly buried large amounts of gold on his property, and Reed turns us into narrative prospectors by making us wonder if the gold was found by greedy relatives, stolen by the police, or, as Reed implies, dug up in the middle of the night by McLemore's neighbor and most intimate companion in the podcast, Tyler Goodson. As with other elements of this true-life story, the legend of buried gold is of McLemore's making. But, in the telling of it, Reed can't seem to recognize what A Streetcar Named Desire's Blanche Dubois (1947), Queen Diva of the southern gothic, would have noticed in a heartbeat: that the story of buried gold is so old that "Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe!—could do it justice!" Although Blanche references Poe's poem "Ulalume" (1847) in the play, where the poet visits his dead lover's grave, in this context I'm talking about Poe's 1843 short story about buried pirate treasure, "The Gold Bug."¹⁸The story of southerners obsessively digging up land in the search for buried gold also echoes the plot of Caldwell's farcical God's Little Acre (1933).

Finally, there's S-Town's closest literary parallel: John Berendt's popular Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994). I wasn't much of a fan of that, either. Both works cast their nonfictional gaze upon a supposedly insular "southern" place and regale their audience with sensational, almost shocking "discoveries" of things like actual gay people! and even more complicated gender dynamics! Here are places, they announce, plagued with racism! and full of crimes of passion! where half the locals are too secretive and the other half are far too garrulous! Even things like college football and getting a tattoo start to sound like arcane rituals. In other words, these texts spectacularize all the colorful, grotesque things you might find virtually anywhere else in these United States, southern stereotypes be damned. To me, there's just not much that's very new in the manner of this podcast's representation. From Berendt to Blanche to Faulkner to Poe, S-Town tells a story we've been hearing for a long time.

Clichés are necessary to Reed's portrayal of a gothic South that needs policing. Like the Victorian novel, S-Town constructs an image of Alabama as the place where disorder and depravity reign. In fact, it is so dysfunctional that even the police need policing. Remember that McLemore's initial email to Reed asked for help investigating not only the alleged murder, but also a case of police corruption. And later, when Reed considers that the police might have stolen McLemore's gold when they first arrived on the suicide scene, McLemore's cousin Reta Lawrence returns to this question of corruption: "Isn't that what John first got in touch with me about to investigate, she says, corruption in the local police?"¹⁹Brian Reed, "Chapter V: Nobody'll Ever Change My Mind About It," March 28, 2017, in S-Town, produced by Brian Reed and Julie Snyder, podcast, MP3 audio, 16:10, https://stownpodcast.org/chapter/5. Maybe the police did steal the gold. But Reed doesn't actually need to solve any of these questions. As satisfying as it is that all the cases are "left open," as Katy Waldman argues, Reed also needs his southern setting to remain gothic and corrupt in order to create the implicit counterexample of a "normal" world where the police aren't corrupt and a "normal," bourgeois person needn't worry about such things.

Another way that Reed bolsters this extended stereotype of the gothic South is through his treatment of race and racism. When Reed visits a tattoo parlor in Chapter II, he takes pains to point out the racism of the young men in the room, as if any listener could miss it. Reed seems to want to shock listeners, presumably by broadcasting what they might not normally hear in public discourse, at least before the 2016 Presidential campaign, but also by confirming that the old figuration of a racist South needs no qualifications or nuances. What's really shocking, however, is Reed's blatant, and rather clumsy, attempt to distance himself from these white men ideologically and geographically. Reed does nothing to confront or complicate the unexamined whiteness of both his real-life subjects and his own perspective.²⁰Wesley Jenkins, "The Empathy of 'S-Town' Doesn't Extend to Black People," BuzzFeed News, April 21, 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/wesleyjenkins/the-empathy-of-s-town-doesnt-extend-to-black-people?utm_term=.fmJA3Xxxe#.jtpwXLBBz; Maaza Mengiste, "How 'S-Town' Fails Black Listeners," Rolling Stone, April 13, 2017, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/how-s-town-fails-black-listeners-w476524. He quietly tells one of the young men that racism in New York is "quieter" than it is in the South.²¹Reed, "Chapter II," 8:34. And then, in case we had any doubts, Reed assures his audience that he is certainly not a racist, for he has boldly, bravely taken the step of making all his social media accounts private to prevent his interviewees from seeing a photo of him with his future wife, Solange, who's black.²²Reed, "Chapter II," 7:58.

Surely Reed can't really believe that these young men are so disconnected from the rest of the world that they wouldn't be able to google his name and find out more. Even bigots in Alabama have smartphones, as McLemore laments at length in Chapter I. I think Reed actually has a different motive for telling us about his social media accounts, for in doing so he positions himself as different from these other white men in important ways. By reminding us that his fiancé is black, Reed telegraphs that he is a nonracist, liberal subject who is much more connected to the modern world, not just in terms of internet savvy, but also in terms of politics. By reminding us that where he hails from racism is allegedly "quieter" (what would Eric Garner say about such a claim?), Reed suggests that he is much less tied to place than the other whites in that tattoo parlor—that he is much more mobile culturally, economically, ideologically, and geographically. Reed's unmarked whiteness allows him to travel in and out of different spaces, while the marked racism of the other white men will, it seems, prevent them from fitting in anywhere else than sweet home Alabama. With a little digital pruning, Reed will be OK in Shittown, but those boys will never make it in New York.

By layering racism, subjectivity, and place onto each other in this way, Reed also puts listeners in the same liberal subject position as himself. We implicitly identify with his narrative voice as he marks those other subjects as different and flawed. Reed wants us to feel that we, like him, are not constrained by our time and place, even if the racism where we live isn't actually "quieter." Reed's narrative manipulations tell us that we, as untethered individuals, must be liberal in the more pedestrian sense, too. Unlike those white Alabamans who don't seem to question or notice that K3 Lumber, their local lumber mill, implicitly honors the Ku Klux Klan, as Reed suggests at the very beginning of Chapter I, our feeling of autonomy—accentuated by the disembodiment of the aural podcast—guarantees we'll never have a problem with Brian Reed's marriage to Solange.²³Reed, "Chapter I," 18:38.

A Queer South

Reed makes similar moves in the way he discusses McLemore's sexuality.  Another thing I like about this podcast is the way that McLemore and his relationships defy simplistic analysis or categorization. The most complicated, and the one to which Reed gives the most airtime, is McLemore's close intimacy with his younger neighbor, Tyler Goodson. As McLemore admits in Chapter V, and as we learn more fully in Chapter VI, their relationship may seem to others more like a "usership" than a "friendship" because of the men's codependencies.²⁴Reed, "Chapter V," 49:09. McLemore gives Goodson money and other kinds of material support, ostensibly for all the odd jobs he performs, while Goodson reciprocates with emotional and physical companionship. There is no clear indication that they had sex, but the erotic, even romantic dimensions of their relationship are unambiguous. Goodson agrees to satisfy McLemore's apparent fetish for pain by regularly tattooing his skin, including his nipples, and even whipping him. And, just before his death, the two men spray-paint their names on a local bridge like a queer combination of teenage lovers and, since they did this on Father's Day, daddy and son.²⁵Reed, "Chapter VI: Since Everyone Around Here Thinks I'm a Queer Anyway," March 28, 2017, in S-Town, produced by Brian Reed and Julie Snyder, podcast, MP3 audio, 50:36, https://stownpodcast.org/chapter/6.

Here is a rich opportunity for mapping some of the unlikely networks of gender, power, and pleasure that shape all those sketchy spaces beyond more familiar queer metropoles such as New York and San Francisco. A useful critical pairing would be Scott Herring's work on the Alabama photographer Michael Meads in Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism.²⁶See Scott Herring, Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 99–124. As Herring demonstrates, Meads's photographs of nude and semi-nude young white men—often in the mise-en-scène of Confederate flags, guns, trophy deer, piney woods, and other objects that signal southerness to the viewer—short-circuit both homonormative assumptions about sexuality and gay identity and metronormative assumptions about sex and homophobia in the rural South.

Anecdotally, I've heard from a goodly number of southern gay white men who say that they like this kind of unsettling dynamic in S-Town. Apparently, to them, as to me, John B. McLemore's character feels at once enigmatic and familiar. He clearly doesn't fit mainstream constructions of either gay or southern identity; and yet, ironically, because of how he blends his intellectualism with a kind of down-home, country campiness, he also seems almost paradigmatically gay and southern. In a comment that he also relates to McLemore's sexuality, blogger Aaron Bady, who is originally from southern Appalachia, also notices this paradox: "John might seem like a one-of-a-kind, but hearing him instantly reminded me of any number of gifted hillbilly eccentrics I've known, red-state liberals whose local roots run deep and murky."²⁷Aaron Bady, "Airbrushing Shittown," Hazlitt, May 1, 2017, https://hazlitt.net/longreads/airbrushing-shittown. The pejorative term "hillbilly" is specific to Appalachia and would not apply to the space of middle Alabama, let alone to McLemore. But, as someone who originates from Appalachia, Bady uses it interchangeably with "redneck" and other terms that generally refer to white southerners historically identified as "poor whites," which is to say, whites whose identities do not fit bourgeois normativities. He also uses these terms in ways that avoid perpetuating negative stereotypes, even as he remains outspoken against the racism, homophobia, and conservatism of so many white southerners.

Nevertheless, Reed's treatment of sexuality is, like his treatment of race and racism, immensely frustrating. In Chapter VI, he tells of how a gay man named Olin Long contacted him to talk about his relationship with McLemore, whom he met through a phone network for gay men in the time before apps like Grindr. They became intimate friends, but not lovers, and Reed dwells on their twelve-year relationship to bolster several assumptions about how hard it must be to be queer in the South, not just for McLemore in particular, but for anyone. (Shane Barnes runs with this notion in his review of the podcast on Vice; Michael A. Lindenberger offers a better take in the Dallas Morning News.²⁸Shane Barnes, "'S-Town' and the Loneliness of Being Gay in the Rural South," Vice, April 13, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/aemwqg/s-town-and-the-loneliness-of-being-gay-in-the-rural-south; Michael A. Lindenberger, "S-Town Humanizes the Haunting Isolation of Gays in Rural America," Dallas Morning News, May 3, 2017, https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/05/03/john-bs-loneliness-tells-us-homosexual-life-rural-america.) Olin Long tells of his deep, moving appreciation of the film Brokeback Mountain, a story of repressed, rural gay love that Reed overlays onto Alabama. It turns out that Long has been celibate for nearly six years, and Reed automatically implies that, much like the Cowboy West of the movie, Long's celibacy is more the fault of the Red-State South than a choice he has made. "John and Olin," says Reed, "both kept their sexuality hidden for much of their lives. John talked to Olin and to me about how you had to be very careful about that where he lived."²⁹Reed, "Chapter VI," 20:44. Later, Reed summarizes that "Living in Birmingham, Olin Long says at least he had places to go on a date, places where he could sit with another man in public and get a coffee or a drink. But John had nothing like that. There's not a single bar in all of Bibb County. And even if there was, it's hard to imagine two men feeling comfortable or safe going on a date there."³⁰Reed, "Chapter VI," 21:47.

I certainly do not want to downplay the deep loneliness and fear that so many queer people experience, perhaps especially in rural locales. I also do not want to downplay the serious threats that LGBTQ+ people face in virtually every public space, certainly not limited to conservative southern spaces. In 1999, in Coosa County, Alabama, about seventy miles from Woodstock, Steve Butler and Charles Mullins murdered thirty-nine-year-old Billy Jack Gaither simply because he was gay, as they confessed.³¹See Allen Tullos, Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 39–42. And in 2004, in Bay Minette, Alabama, down near Mobile, Christopher Gaines murdered eighteen-year-old Scotty Joe Weaver, in part because he was gay.³²See Jen Christensen, "Scotty's Last Moments: The Murder of a Gay Teen—Allegedly at the Hands of His Best Friends—Has Rattled a Small Alabama Town," The Advocate, September 28, 2004. Both were high-profile cases that Long and McLemore almost certainly would have known. But gay life in the South is obviously more than just a matter of fear and violence, as we can easily see in the documentary Small Town Gay Bar (2006)—which discusses Weaver's murder alongside stories of queer resistance, love, and triumph—and in the work of writers and activists like Minnie Bruce Pratt, who hails from Centreville in Bibb County.³³See Pratt's lecture "When I Say 'Steal,' Who Do You Think Of?" Southern Spaces, July 21, 2004, https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2004/when-i-say-steal-who-do-you-think and her poem "No Place," Southern Spaces, July 27, 2004, https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2004/no-place.

Or maybe if Reed had read John Howard's work on the history of gay male car culture in rural Mississippi he'd know that being gay doesn't always require brick-and-mortar buildings with rainbow flags in front.³⁴See John Howard, Men Like That: A Queer Southern History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 78–125. As Howard's pathbreaking work reveals, LGBTQ+ people in Mississippi in the middle of the twentieth century, and gay men in particular, did not forge a sense of identity and community simply by meeting in bars or bookstores. Car culture was central: men met men in cars for sex, shared cars to travel back and forth between homes and towns and cities, and gathered in cars in unsurveilled rural spaces. Keeping in mind the different power dynamics attached to race, class, and gender presentation, LGBTQ+ southerners are able to come out and go out in towns and villages as well as cities. And sometimes, as we see in the case studies Howard discusses and in McLemore's own unusual friendship with Tyler Goodson, queer men don't need conventional (hetero) dating rituals to develop lasting relationships.

Moreover, doesn't McLemore tell Reed at the beginning of Chapter II that "Me and Roger Price had went up to the truck stop together to get a little dinner"?³⁵Reed, "Chapter II," 0:28. They weren't on a date, but they were still two men sitting together, and they didn't encounter any homophobia. What does Reed think gay men do on dates that's different from what McLemore and Price did? More to the point, why doesn't Reed do more with McLemore's statement that "everyone around here thinks I'm a queer anyway"?³⁶Reed, "Chapter I," 42:37. Reed uses this line as the title of Chapter VI, but he never really asks why McLemore would have to keep his sexuality "hidden" if his queerness is already, in a manner of speaking, public knowledge.

In any case, Reed backs away from that challenge and tells us that, because of McLemore's semi-rural Alabama situation, the only other potential partners he could find were an older man, "William," the married construction worker who tutored him in sex, and two other men whom he met on the phone line.³⁷Reed, "Chapter VI," 16:58. Eventually, William faded away, and, according to Reed's account of what McLemore and Long told him, those other two men were too grotesque for words. One was "repulsive-looking, a chain smoker with tobacco-stained teeth," and the other had made a date at John's house only because he wanted a quick encounter.³⁸Reed, "Chapter VI," 22:30. When McLemore didn't want to immediately jump into bed, according to Long, the man sat on the porch and "masturbated into whatever that flower bush was there. And then he left."³⁹Reed, "Chapter VI," 23:42.

Alabama is certainly not the only place where you can find bad sex and awkward encounters. But Reed portrays Alabama as homophobic, intolerant, and virtually empty of that thirty-five-percent plurality of LGBTQ+ residents, making no real distinction between the surrounding countryside and Alabama's largest city (let alone larger cities like New Orleans, Miami, or Atlanta). Reed suggests that "Alabama" causes McLemore's loneliness far more than any of his idiosyncrasies or choices. Apparently, the problem had nothing to do with the fact that McLemore could be socially awkward, or that his strong personality might have scared some men away (remember that Reed waited a good while before he started replying to his initial calls and emails), but that he lived in a place where it's just too hard to meet the right guy. Ironically (or perhaps intentionally?), it never even seems to occur to Reed, the savvy creator of a digital podcast, that his queer subject might have moved on from antiquated telephone chatrooms to dating and hookup apps on his smartphone. It's as if the digital revolution missed Reed's version of Alabama altogether.

At least one reviewer has taken Reed to task for trying to force McLemore's sexuality to fit a normative frame of monogamy and romantic love, as if what he must have really wanted was an LTR that he could take on vacation to Fire Island.⁴⁰Daniel Schroeder, "S-Town Was Great—Until It Forced a Messy Queer Experience Into a Tidy Straight Frame," Slate, April 11, 2017, http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2017/04/11/s_town_podcast_s_treatment_of_queer_experience_hobbled_by_straight_biases.html. But Reed's questionable portrayal produces another effect that brings me back to subjectivity. As he tells us about McLemore's failed relationships, Reed makes sure to remind us that his own sexuality is hardly so constrained. Once again, Reed uses his wife, Solange, to do so, telling us that it took him a while to reply to Long's email because it arrived during the time of Reed's wedding.⁴¹Reed, "Chapter VI," 7:37. Got it? Reed's sexuality is healthy and fully realized, while Long's and McLemore's erotic and romantic lives must go unfulfilled—because Alabama makes it too hard to come out and find a partner in the first place. To be clear, I'm not saying Reed is being homophobic. Rather, the podcast implies that if Long or McLemore had gotten out of Alabama, they could have found the same kind of happiness that Reed enjoys with Solange. In S-Town, they are tragic victims of location, while Reed is the liberal subject whose life in New York has (ironically) given him the freedom and autonomy to fully embrace his sexuality and find marital bliss.

Liberal Subjects

S-Town imagines a repressive and regressive "Alabama"—one that blurs into an equally backwards "South," regardless of whether it's rural, urban, or in between—in order to paint Brian Reed the narrator, and, by extension, all the podcast's listeners, as modern, mobile, and progressive. As Reed polices the narrative space of this queer and backwards Alabama, he never reveals something new that will change our perception of the state or our own circumstances. We never get past the cliché of a racism somehow predominately, if not exclusively, southern. We never find other ways to live and love that challenge the prescriptions of both hetero- and homonormativity. And we never remedy police corruption. Reed is no more interested in solving anything, including McLemore's suicide, than he is in reforming the actual institutions of the state of Alabama. Instead, just as D.A. Miller interprets in the Victorian novel, Reed uses a twisted Alabama to "repair normality" for listeners. Wherever we might be physically listening to the podcast, S-Town depicts Shittown, Alabama, in a way that makes us feel like we are all living in a better place.

How do we know our place is better? Because we don't need policing the way the people of Shittown do. Because in Shittown people are too openly racist, not like the "quieter" people of New York. Because in Shittown it's too hard to be gay. Because people in Shittown steal your property, dig up your gold, beat each other up in the woods, and so on. In Shittown people conduct dangerous experiments with mercury, even though the European milliners who wrote about the procedure back in the 1800s warned them not to. And, tragically, when the mercury poisoning combines with Shittown's other determining factors to finally drive you crazy, the people there don't even honor your last wishes by calling your friends when you die.

If I sound glib about McLemore's suicide, it's not because I actually feel that way, but because I believe the structure of the podcast is glib. The tone of the podcast honors the true genius of John B. McLemore. But the structure of S-Town tells us that the ultimate tragedy is that McLemore lived in Alabama and never got out. That is not to say that the podcast doesn't portray the citizens of Shittown as liberal subjects in their own right. But, like McLemore, they are always flawed subjects. When Tyler Goodson says in Chapter V that Reed must think he's a "bad person" for taking things off McLemore's land after his death, Reed condescendingly assures him: "No, man, I see you as a complicated, normal person. You know, I disagree with some of your decisions. But you also—you've had a very different life experience than I've had."⁴²Reed, "Chapter V," 44:40, 44:50. A few minutes earlier in the podcast, Reta also worries that she would come across as a "bad person" because of her behavior in the property dispute (Reed, "Chapter V," 38:00). The implication here is that if Goodson had lived anywhere else—let's say New York—maybe he could have been just the same as Reed: well-traveled, successful, and "good." However, all the "bad" forces of Shittown have compromised Goodson by giving him a "very different life experience." Because of these forces, Reed suggests, Goodson will always remain "bad" and "different" from "normal" people, even if he could lift himself out of his poverty with the sudden windfall of McLemore's buried gold.

John B. McLemore, of course, is more extraordinary than Tyler Goodson. And, in terms of the narrative work of the podcast, this difference makes McLemore's fatal emplacement within Reed's southern imaginary an even greater tragedy. Reed expresses this idea in his depiction of McLemore as a crusader in Chapter II:

The shitty misfortunes John fixates on, they're not a bunch of disparate things. They're all the same thing. His Shittown is part of Bibb County, which is part of Alabama, which is part of the United States, which is part of Earth, which is experiencing climate change, which no one is doing anything about. It maddens John. The whole world is giving a collective shrug of its shoulders and saying fuck it.

What I admire about John is that in his own misanthropic way, he's crusading against one of the most powerful, insidious forces we face—resignation, the numb acceptance that we can't change things. He's trying to shake people out of their stupor, trying to convince them that it is possible to make their world a better place.⁴³Reed, "Chapter II," 34:35.

From local corruption to planetary climate change, McLemore sensed all the social, political, economic, and natural forces that were acting upon—and against—humanity, and his tragedy was that he couldn't forget or disavow them. He could not find a way to survive because he could not blind or numb himself—even through pain—to the carceral restraints of our destructive global society. McLemore simply could not repair his own normality.

As the podcast implicitly tells us, however, we listeners still have the chance to forget and disavow. S-Town doesn't show us McLemore's almost panicked obsession with climate change so that we will also begin panicking about climate change. It doesn't tell his story so that we will run out and try to "change things." Rather, the podcast quarantines all that worry within John B. McLemore in order to repair our sense of our normality. Sure, we might worry about climate change a little—for, as D.A. Miller points out, the liberal subject's fantasy of being free from the world's determining forces also allows him to "conceive of himself as a resistance: a friction in the smooth functioning of the social order, a margin to which its far-reaching discourse does not reach."⁴⁴Miller, The Novel and the Police, 207. Nevertheless, the point of the podcast is that we should be careful not to adopt McLemore's intensity and resist too much. As good liberals, we can fight for a new world of clean energy, interracial love, and queer comradeship, but the podcast suggests that if we fight too hard we might find ourselves buried next to John McLemore in Shittown. For if his brilliant mind couldn't change the forces that seek to discipline and destroy us at every level, how on earth could we?

Ultimately, the podcast is inviting us to identify with Reed, who is obviously freer and happier than all the residents of Shittown. In the logic of this work of aural literature, we must repair ourselves and our normality by imagining ourselves as a liberal subject like Reed the narrator, just as Victorian readers would have done. I don't mean that Reed is trying to shake us back into the "stupor" that McLemore was trying to shake us out of. But daily survival in a world on the brink of mass extinction really does require a lot of forgetting. In so many ways, our survival depends on our belief that we are persons with some power to resist. On its own, that belief will not help us stop climate change, but it's necessary all the same. And the fact that S-Town gives us these feelings of freedom and possibility explains its immense popularity. If a film version could accomplish the same thing—assuming the lawsuit against the podcast's makers allowed an adaptation to proceed—I imagine it would get even higher ratings, although I still cannot see how a film could do so without continuing to misrepresent Alabama and the South, and what it means to be queer in those spaces.

S-Town's literary predecessor, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, ends with a celebration of the restored and persistent pleasures of the southern gothic:

For me, Savannah's resistance to change was its saving grace. The city looked inward, sealed off from the noises and distractions of the world at large. It grew inward, too, and in such a way that its people flourished like hothouse plants tended by an indulgent gardener. The ordinary became the extraordinary. Eccentrics thrived. Every nuance and quirk of personality achieved greater brilliance in that lush enclosure than would have been possible anywhere else in the world.⁴⁵John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (New York: Random House, 1994), 388.

But in the story that Reed tells, nothing grows in the scorched earth of S-Town, where its key "eccentric" found he could no longer thrive. This inability to thrive is symbolized most clearly in the story of McLemore's hedge maze. In Chapter I, Reed dwells at length on the maze that McLemore and Goodson built on McLemore's land—a maze with moveable doors that allowed McLemore to create sixty-four different solutions as well as an insoluble "null set."⁴⁶Reed, "Chapter I," 29:50. After McLemore's death, the maze fell into disrepair, and the hedges died. Although Reed does not talk about that decay, it is clear even within the podcast that the maze will never reach the "maturity" wished for in the final Chapter.⁴⁷Brian Reed, "Chapter VII: You're Beginning To Figure It Out Now, Aren't You?" March 28, 2017, in S-Town, produced by Brian Reed and Julie Snyder, podcast, MP3 audio, 24:27, https://stownpodcast.org/chapter/7. The maze signifies McLemore's attempt to impose his own vision of order and wonder on the landscape. But after the podcast, we remain trapped in the maze of Reed's creation. When tourists go to Bibb County to look for the maze, they find they can only know it as they have encountered it in the podcast. As William Thornton writes for AL.com, many who visit the town of Woodstock do not find the Shittown they expect, for the maze is effectively gone and the citizens do not fit the impression that the podcast creates.⁴⁸William Thornton, "The Seeds of S-Town: Woodstock Looks for Healing," AL.com, September 6, 2018, https://www.al.com/news/2018/09/the_seeds_of_s-town_woodstock.html. It is the podcast's depiction of Shittown that endures most of all.

If we could separate McLemore's voice from the narrative frame, what might we learn? Could he help us build new kinds of spatial narratives in addition to the temporal ones Rooney traces in her article? What might he teach us about being queer? Or even solving climate change? I am particularly interested in the possible links between his self-identification as a "semi-homosexual" and his becoming "unbanked."⁴⁹Brian Reed, "Chapter III: Tedious and Brief," March 28, 2017, in S-Town, produced by Brian Reed and Julie Snyder, podcast, MP3 audio, 34:16, https://stownpodcast.org/chapter/3. As he claimed to have mostly withdrawn from capitalist financial structures, how did he also imagine his sexuality as never fully fitting a coherent ideological category? How was he trying to occupy a subject position outside the control of capitalist networks and epistemologies that seek to make every individual fully knowable and accountable? What might be the advantages of other LGBTQ+ people following this lead—as southerners such as Minnie Bruce Pratt have been doing for years—fighting for sexual and gender liberation by revising and restructuring, or perhaps just rejecting, the systems of twenty-first-century global capitalism? Back in 1983, before the turn to the umbrella terms queer and LGBTQ+, historian John D'Emilio pointed out that "gay men and lesbians" were especially well positioned to build alternatives to exploitative capitalist regimes—to create models of sociality and community that "broaden the opportunities for living outside traditional heterosexual family units" and "provide a [stronger] material basis for personal autonomy."⁵⁰John D'Emilio, "Capitalism and Gay Identity," in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University (New York: Routledge, 1992), 13. Up to his death in 2015, John B. McLemore was essentially calling for the same thing, but with even greater urgency.

Maybe if I went back and listened one more time, I'd find the answers to these questions buried in McLemore's monologues. But then I'd still be grappling with the narrative frame that arranges them into a meaningful structure. I'd be right back where I started, and still not a fan of the podcast. Maybe Brian Reed should just release McLemore's full recordings, monologues, and emails, however interminable and insufferable they may be. Listening to an unedited John B. McLemore might not be as entertaining or as pleasant, but it would still be profoundly interesting. Maybe that's what we need to "shake people out of their stupor" and show the rest of the nation that thirty-five percent of its queer population really do have something important to say.

About the Author

Michael P. Bibler is Robert Penn Warren Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936–1968 and co-editor of the collection of essays Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the US South. He is currently finishing a book manuscript about literalism and silliness in literature, music, performance, and film from the 1980s to the present, entitled "Literally, Queerly: The Pleasures of Silly Objects and Identities."

Introduction

During the antebellum era, New Orleans became the second largest port of US immigration after New York City, leading hundreds of thousands of Germans to begin new lives at the mouth of the Mississippi rather than the Hudson. ¹Carl Leon Bankston, ed., Encyclopedia of American Immigration, vol. 2 (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2010), 476. New Orleans boasted one of the earliest and most vibrant German communities in North America, yet the German-born growth rate in Louisiana during these years pales in comparison to states such as New York and Pennsylvania, as well as that of other slave states such as Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland. In fact, between 1850–1860 it exceeds that of only Vermont, Maine, and South Carolina.²For the history of the settlement of Louisiana’s Cotes des Allemandes (the German coast) near New Orleans, see: Ellen C. Merrill, The Germans of Louisiana (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2005). Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth U.S. Census 1860a­-04, 2–590; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Seventh U.S. Census 1850a-02, xxxvi. Could yellow fever and the imagined racial unsuitability of Germans to tropical climates help account for this phenomenon? A close examination of historical sources returns a resounding "Yes."

European Bodies, Climate, and the Geography of Yellow Fever

As a catalyst for German interest in America, the Louisiana Purchase unleashed a flood of speculation regarding whether US stewardship of the Purchase territory could lead to the realization of the biblical "land of milk and honey." According to observations reprinted by Johann Friedrich Nonne, editor of the Neue Allgemeine Weltbühne, in 1804, "the eyes of all Europe…now focused on Louisiana." The author of the piece downplayed concerns regarding the city's unhealthy reputation, which he attributed to the neglect of its former French caretakers, and expressed confidence that the territory's new masters would fare better in realizing New Orleans's potential.³Johann Friedrich Nonne, eds. Neue Allgemeine Weltbühne Auf Das Jahr 1804, (Erfurt, Germany: Johann Friedrich Nonne, 1804), 499; Thank you to Alexander Cors for encouraging a more suitable translation and for clarifying Nonne’s role in reprinting this piece. Over the next half-century Germans wrote extensively about the United States, particularly about the Louisiana Purchase and its suitability for settlement.

From 1815 onward, accounts of "travels in the New World became almost a mania among Germans."⁴Paul Weber, America in Imaginative German Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1926), 102–103. In 1836, for example, a single volume of the Jenaischen Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung reviewed twenty-one North American emigration guides.⁵“Neueste Colonisations-Schriften,” Ergänzungsblätter zur Jenaischen Jenaischen Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung 2, nos. 84–85 (1836): 281–295. Leading German newspapers began publishing weekly columns on culture and politics by Germans in America as well as observations on the relationship between climate and health.⁶Maria Wagner, ed., Was die Deutschen aus Amerika berichteten, 1828–1865 (Stuttgart, Germany: H. D. Heinz, 1985), x–xi. "In the most remote forest hut as well as in the middle-class dwelling," noted nineteenth-century German scholar Heinrich Julian Schmidt, "the only book that could be seen in the hands of a farmer or gentleman, was a book about America."⁷Julian Schmidt, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von Leibniz bis auf unsere Zeit (1896; repr., Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2011), 271. 

One of the most salient features of this writing was its demonstration of "Wissenschafts-popularisierung" (the popularization of science).⁸Andreas Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit (München, Germany: Oldenbourg, 2002). German writers from different walks of life consumed and disseminated knowledge from the burgeoning field of medical geography: the post-Enlightenment amalgamation of geography and the rediscovery of classical theories that insisted on the interrelationship between climate, environment, and disease.⁹Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997), 302; Mark Harrison, Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 49. One result was an attempt to demarcate the southernmost limits of acceptable German settlement based upon a racialized discourse of "climate" largely informed by the susceptibility of European bodies to yellow fever.

German-American historian La Vern Rippley acknowledged in 1976 that Germans often cited "climate" as a major deterrent to settlement in the southernmost United States. Rippley, however, apparently didn't consider the term within the parlance of the era.¹⁰La Vern J. Rippley, The German Americans (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1976), 44–45. More recent scholars have unpacked nuances of words like "climate" to reveal that nineteenth-century European and American understandings of health and disease were inextricable from their environment. When nineteenth-century Germans referred to their suitability to certain climates, they were often speaking about the perceived health of the land.¹¹Conevery Bolton Valenčius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). Environmental historians, such as Conevery Bolton Valenčius and Linda Nash, have demonstrated how depictions of the health of the land were invaluable to nineteenth-century settlers in the burgeoning American West. Some German observers spoke favorably of the weather in Louisiana while simultaneously deriding the climate as ungesund (unhealthy).

Drawing upon extensive observations published in the German-speaking states of northern Europe this article explores the collective medical geography of the Gulf South as produced through German travel and settlement writing. By collective medical geography, I refer to the gestalt of this literature within the minds of its readers. To get a sense of this perceived landscape, I have mapped the observations detailed in this work and laid them on top of each other, like transparencies on an old overhead projector (see figures below). Having mapped each author's medico-geographical observations, I juxtaposed them with immigration and settlement data from the seventh (1850) and eighth (1860) United States Censuses to demonstrate the effect of this discourse on German immigration and eventual settlement.¹²Both the census of 1850 and 1860 provide population statistics by nation of origin, providing the total number of German-born in each state. Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth U.S. Census 1860a-04, 2–590; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Seventh U.S. Census 1850a-02, xxxvi.

The result suggests a strong correlation between the discourse of medical geography and German settlement patterns. It also raises questions about longstanding assumptions regarding slavery as the determining factor in German settlement, especially when one considers that slave states which received clean bills of health showed dramatic population increases. While some scholars have suggested that Germans avoided the US South almost exclusively due to their aversion to slavery, many German-American historians have cautioned against inscribing the beliefs of the outspoken Forty-Eighters on the entire German-American population, including the approximately 225,000 German-born citizens who lived in slave states on the eve of the Civil War.¹³For more on German-Americans and motivations for German-American settlement see: Merill, Germans of Louisiana, 9, 32–40; Walter D. Kamphoefner and Wolfgang Helbich, eds., Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 2–3; Rippley, The German Americans, 51;  Andrea Mehrländer, The Germans of Charleston, Richmond and New Orleans during the Civil War Period, 1850-1870 (Berlin, Germany: Degruyter, 2011) 14; Patricia Herminghouse, “The German Secrets of New Orleans,” German Studies Review 27 (February 2004): 1–12; Wagner, Was die Deutschen aus Amerika berichteten, xi–xii.

While anti-slavery sentiment was not uncommon among Germans, other reasons more likely led to their near complete avoidance of the Gulf South: availability of land, access to cities, industrialization, etc. Closer scrutiny reveals the importance, often above all other concerns, Germans placed on settling in a salubrious climate. When combined with German laments that New Orleans's insalubrity offset its economic and cultural potential, this collective medical geography—based almost exclusively on the presence of yellow fever—was a deterring factor for German settlement in the Gulf South.

Consider as well the seasonal patterns of German immigration through New Orleans. Once its insalubrity was established in this literature by the late 1840s, German authors turned to questions of New Orleans as an economically viable port of entry to the American interior. Founded in 1847, the Deutsche Gesellschaft von New Orleans (a German-American society, DGNO) embraced this role, as is evident in annual reports and communications that dissuaded Germans from settling in Louisiana due in large part to the presence of yellow fever. The DGNO advised immigrants to utilize the port as an economical and German-friendly point of entry, but to time their arrival so that it did not fall within the yellow fever season (late May through early October). By charting the port records of the DGNO between 1847 and 1860 (see figure above) a clear correlation between their recommendations to newcomers and the arrival of German immigrants becomes apparent.

Why did Germans single out yellow fever among prevalent diseases? After all, as then American diplomat and naturalist David Bailie Warden wrote in 1819, "the ravages of yellow fever are confined to the crowded streets of the most commercial towns, and its victims are less numerous than those of the bilious putrid fever, or typhus, which sometimes runs over [all of Europe]."¹⁴David Baillie Warden, A Statistical, Political, and Historical Account of the United States of America (Edinburgh, Scotland: Hurst, Robinson, and Company, 1819), 281. While Americans attempted to downplay yellow fever against concerns abroad, what was important to consider when qualifying German fascination with the disease was not how many yellow fever killed, but whom it killed and how they died.

Unbeknownst at the time, yellow fever is transmitted to humans through a mosquito vector, the female Aedes aegypti. The mystery of the disease's transmission confounded contemporary medical observers leading to theories ranging from domestic origination of miasmas to the direct importation of contagious persons and/or inanimate fomites. There was broad consensus on two points: first, that the affliction targeted strangers to tropical climates, hence its moniker as a "strangers' disease," and, second, the erroneous assumption that individuals of African descent carried an inherent racial immunity.¹⁵Margaret Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 6–7. Jo Ann Carrigan, The Saffron Scourge: A History of Yellow Fever in Louisiana (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1994), 10–11; Mariola Espinosa, “The Question of Racial Immunity to Yellow Fever in History and Historiography” Social Science History 38, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall/Winter 2014): 437–454. These two factors, whether real or imagined, carried tremendous weight for would-be German immigrants.

Beyond fears that they were more susceptible to yellow fever as strangers to the Gulf South, contemporaries suggested an underlying racial justification: the widespread belief that (white) Europeans and Americans could become acclimated over a period of years to regions otherwise hostile to their racial constitutions. Troubling to many observers, the process of acclimation suggested that the perceived immunity of slaves of West African descent confirmed a racialized climate theory often used to justify chattel slavery in the Trans-Atlantic South. That Europeans could acclimate to climates suitable for Africans raised concerns about whether the process led to racial mutability and/or degradation in whites.¹⁶David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 25–32. There is a lengthy historiography of racialized climate theory broadly conceived by Europeans in the nineteenth century. The following examples attest to American and European utilization of that theory within the American South: Mark Carey, “Inventing Caribbean Climates: How Science, Medicine and Tourism Changed Tropical Weather from Deadly to Healthy,” Osiris 26, no. 1 (2011): 129–130; A.  Cash Koeniger, “Climate and Southern Distinctiveness” Journal of Southern History 54, no. 1 (February 1988): 21–44; and Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South, 7. Not only would German bodies be extremely susceptible to this devastating affliction, becoming acclimated seemed to suggest that something inside them had changed.

The presence of tropical diseases, such as yellow fever, also shaped German conceptualizations of the Gulf South as a tropical place. Whereas the distinction between free and slave states has served to delineate between North and South in many US historical studies, it is evident from their descriptions and settlement patterns that nineteenth-century Germans viewed what political historians refer to as the lower South as being a part of a larger Gulf South: one that would include eastern Mexico and the Greater Caribbean. This is not to say that they did not appreciate the political distinctions between these places, but in terms of fitness for settlement words such as "tropical" and "West Indian heat," were often used to describe areas deemed ungesund.

This collective medical geography informed German imaginations, or cognitive mapping, of southern spaces such as the Gulf South's commercial center of New Orleans. Prior to photography and video—and before mass production of maps and illustrated books in the mid-nineteenth century—Europeans relied on the written or spoken word to inform their perceptions of places they had not visited. Settlement literature would influence the spatial imaginary. Writing that emphasized insalubrity and macabre scenes of epidemic yellow fever had a deleterious affect on German perceptions of New Orleans as a space.¹⁷Cognitive mapping has been utilized by a wide array of fields, but the most influential of these works are arguably those within environmental psychology and city planning. See: R.M. Kitchin, “Cognitive Maps: What are They and Why Study Them,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 14 (1994): 1–19; and Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1960).

In addition to concerns of their unique susceptibility and fears of racial degradation in regions unbefitting their racial stock, the way in which yellow fever victims died embellished the disease's exotic and macabre reputation for would-be German settlers. The accumulation of the virus in the lymph nodes and the associated immune response leads to high fever and the onset of chills. As the liver is compromised, jaundice sets in, giving the victim's skin the yellowish hue that names the disease. Hepatic congestion brought on by liver failure and the eventual "systemic dysfunction of the clotting system" leads to hemorrhaging of the lining of the upper digestive system. Partially digested blood is forcefully expelled through the nose and mouth, producing a black vomit by which also characterizes the disease. Combined with descriptions of seizures and fevered delusions, lay accounts testify to the horror of this progression upon the afflicted and its effect on their caretakers.¹⁸Humphreys, Yellow Fever and the South, 5–6. It is no wonder that Germans placed as much emphasis on yellow fever as they did.

Travel Tales: The "Unhealthy Cities" of the South, 1820–1830

After the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), the optimism that Johann Friedrich Nonne expressed in 1804 regarding New Orleans's future salubrity was scarce among German authors. This coincided with the environmental trend in Enlightenment-era medicine that suggested nature exerted powerful forces upon the land and European bodies. Yellow fever was perceived as a product of tropical climates that could not easily be mitigated.¹⁹Ibid., 18–19; Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 302; Harrison, Contagion, 49. Germans who had traveled to tropical places during and after the Napoleonic Wars testified to the havoc these climates unleashed on German bodies. For many of these writers, the presence of endemic yellow fever was sufficient to designate a place as tropical and, therefore, ungesund.

Following his service as a Prussian artillery lieutenant in the Napoleonic Wars, Johan Valentin Hecke turned to "scientific pursuits and travel."²⁰J. Valentin Hecke, Reise durch die Vereinigten Staaten von Nord-Amerika in den Jahren 1818 und 1819, vol. 1 (Berlin: H. Pb. Petri, 1820), 1. In his 1820, two-volume Tour of the United States of North America in the Years 1818 and 1819, yellow fever figured prominently. Little is known of Hecke's life beyond his military service, but a reviewer of his Tour in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung suggested that fellow Germans exercise caution in where they chose to settle.²¹“Vermischte Schriften,” Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (1821): 785–792. They would do "better to be poor at home" than die abroad.²²Ibid., 792.

While, like Nonne before him, Hecke believed human agency—such as a lack of sanitation leading to pestilential miasma—could contribute to the unhealthiness of climate, the determining factor was "West Indian heat."²³Hecke, Reise durch die Vereinigten Staaten, vol. 1, 76. This heat, Hecke and others insisted, exacerbated miasmatic conditions present in many port cities and led to increased frequency and virulence of tropical diseases: most notably, yellow fever.²⁴Ibid., 166–67. Hecke's contribution lay in his detailed observations of major cities and their salubrity up and down the eastern seaboard and on the Gulf Coast.

Of all the diseases he encountered, Hecke devoted far more pages to yellow fever, dubbing it "the transatlantic plague," capable of striking "even among the hardened and seafarers accustomed to almost any climate." "Only a select few survive this terrible, nervous system-shattering disease," he wrote, and those who did would "never again reach their previous health."²⁵Ibid., 167–183. As for the uneven distribution of yellow fever between North and South, Hecke estimated that the absence of persistent West-Indian heat explained why "in the northern states yellow fever is restricted to the seaports." While he assailed the "pestilential swamps" of the South as a haven for the disease, he noted that Delaware and New Jersey were dotted with marshes, yet "not one person has been carried away" by yellow fever.²⁶Ibid., 166–67, 170

The further south Hecke traveled, the more he remarked on the prevalence of yellow fever. While he lauded the mountains of Virginia for their cooler and healthier climate, he was none too kind to the coastal areas. Hecke remarked that the "especially unhealthy city" of Norfolk and its surrounding coastline were dotted with pestilential fever-producing swamps. These swamps, along with high temperatures, incubated yellow and other malignant fevers that seemed to "occur almost every year."²⁷Ibid., 161.

Of the Carolinas, Hecke was unabashedly critical. In Charleston, every summer the "burning West Indian heat" was "usually accompanied by the yellow fever."²⁸Ibid., 166 Hecke wrote of a girl whose German-immigrant family operated a farm not far from Charleston when, without warning, yellow fever struck. Within a few days, the disease had orphaned her. Hungry and alone, she was found wandering the road.²⁹Ibid., 167.

"Despite all its glories," Hecke felt that New Orleans was "the unhealthiest place in the United States, and perhaps all of the Americas."³⁰Ibid., 170–171. He noted "every year the yellow fever calls for its victims" in the Crescent City and that in the previous summer "one day after another, 100 [bodies] were lowered into the ground."³¹Ibid. He referenced the affliction's reputation as a strangers' disease, "so very dangerous not only for Europeans, but for northern Americans as well."³²Ibid. Hecke's lament would be echoed in German settlement literature in the coming decades.

To emphasize the reach of the disease, Hecke wrote of a vessel anchored just outside of New Orleans during an outbreak. The ship carried "five young craftsmen who sought to take refuge [from yellow fever] in the northern states." After a short time removed from the port, each of the craftsmen fell ill. According to Hecke's informant, all five of them had fled only to perish before reaching their destination.³³Ibid., 171. "No one [could] count on a long life in New Orleans, much less a comfortable one."³⁴Ibid., 170–171.

Fellow Prussian artillery lieutenant Ignatz Hülswitt's portrayal of how yellow fever attacked and eventually killed its victims reads like a horror novel. Detailing the onset of this "fast-progressing and terrible disease," Hülswitt noted in the final stage, the victim could expect to endure "incessant vomiting and discharges of a black matter, which looks almost like tar" and "after a clear decline of all powers, strong jaundice, and maddening seizures, death usually comes on the seventh or eighth day." Hülswitt purportedly spoke from experience. Citing his own "irreplaceable loss," he claimed that during his time in Louisiana the disease had struck him down and robbed him of his "dear wife."³⁵Ignatz Hülswitt, Tagebuch einer Reise nach den Vereinigten Staaten und der Nordwestküste von Amerika (Münster, Germany: Coppenrathschen Buch und Kunsthandlung, 1828), 306, 308. Hülswitt warned German readers that yellow fever resided "in the cities of Louisiana and causes much suffering," especially "among the newcomers."³⁶Hülswitt, Tagebuch einer Reise nach den Vereinigten Staaten, 305–306. Despite praising the state as "indisputably one of the most beautiful in America," like Hecke, Hülswitt lamented his racial unsuitability for Louisiana.³⁷Ibid., 304.

In a review of Hülswitt's work in the Neue Allgemeine Geographische und Statistische Ephemeriden, prospective immigrants to Louisiana were cautioned that, despite attaining a "comfortably furnished home on 160 acres of land," yellow fever had taken Hülswitt's wife and ravaged his constitution to the extent that he spent a year rehabilitating "without being able to recover from the effects of the fever."³⁸Neue Allgemeine Geographische und Statistische Ephemeriden, (Weimar, Germany: Geographischen Institut und des Landes-Industrie-Comptoirs, 1830) 215. The affordability of land and the lure of prosperity came with dangerous consequences.

Unbeknownst to readers, Hülswitt may have fabricated the incident. Scholars have confirmed that he plagiarized much of his 1828 Diary of a Trip to the United States and the Northwest Coast of America from Englishman John R. Jewitt's Journal Kept at Nootka Sound: an account of Jewitt's abduction, enslavement, and eventual assimilation into the Nuu-chah-nulth tribe. While the portion of his book that dealt with his bout with yellow fever in Louisiana has not yet been attributed to any other author, there is no proof that Hülswitt traveled to America.³⁹Peter Littke, “Ignatz Hülswitt, the German ‘John R. Jewitt’ at Nootka Sound?” The Initiative for Russian American History, April 2002, www.irah.eu. It's possible that Hülswitt's narrative of his family's bout with yellow fever was an attempt to exoticize an already sensational tale.

In 1835, encouraged by the swell of interest in travel narratives, Duke Friedrich Paul Wilhelm, a naturalist, explorer, and nephew of the first king of Württemberg, published his First Travels in North America, 1822–1824.⁴⁰Friedrich Paul Wilhelm, Travels in North America 1822-1824, ed. Robert Nitske and Savoie Lottinville (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), xiii. Having spurned the military life in pursuit of botany and other natural studies, "Duke Paul" set out to further the work begun by his idols, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. As a self-styled expert of natural science, he believed himself an ideal candidate to report on the climate and ecology of Louisiana and its environs.⁴¹Ibid., xv, xiii–xx.

Landing in New Orleans, Wilhelm reports he was briefed on the recent yellow fever epidemic and felt blessed that a delay had kept him from arriving at its peak. "Many German countrymen who had not left," he reported, "had fallen victim to its plague."⁴²Ibid., 34. The following year he escaped another yellow fever epidemic as it swept through. Returning to the city from yet another trip to the "interior of North America," Wilhelm was "saddened by the news of the death of a highly valued friend." He consequently declared "all strangers [should] shun New Orleans from June to November."⁴³Ibid., 21, 34.

Like his counterparts, Duke Paul found much to appreciate in New Orleans. Enthralled by the city's commercial potential and the steamships that traveled the Mississippi, he wrote that "trade and population would increase enormously if the climate and unhealthful situation did not disturb both."⁴⁴Ibid., 34. He had little faith in New Orleans's measures to combat yellow fever, noting that a "quarantine station intended to protect the city from contagious diseases" was too far up river to prove effective. Ships could disembark early and circumvent quarantine, enabling those exposed to the disease to "go unhindered in the city."⁴⁵Ibid., 31.

That Wilhelm traveled through Louisiana at this time appears to be corroborated by other accounts. He purportedly crossed paths with a young German named Max who had escaped a yellow fever epidemic that had decimated St. Francisville, Louisiana. Max's account comes from letters edited and published by his father in Ulm alongside those of his sister and uncle in Excerpts from Letters from North America (1833).⁴⁶Auszüge aus Briefen aus Nord-Amerika, geschrieben von zweien aus Ulm an der Donau gebürtigen, num in Staate Louisiana ansässigen Geschwistern (Ulm, Germany: E. Nübling Book Printers, 1833), 32–35, 51. Not to chance misinterpretation, Max's father emphasized his purpose for publishing his children's letters in an ominous foreword. He asked that "the youth and newly married couples who felt the impulse to emigrate to North America" heed this cautionary tale left behind, "especially the descriptions of the state of Louisiana and New Orleans."⁴⁷Ibid., foreword. 

In writing of a steamboat trip from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, Max noted the well-developed land and beautiful plantations.⁴⁸Ibid., 22–23. He remarked on the affordability of life in Louisiana, adding that he and his uncle were able to rent their storefront, an African slave, and a wagon for only fifty-three Spanish talers per year.⁴⁹Ibid., 28. Max expressed fear, however, of the area's becoming "unhealthy" by summer due to the annual flooding of the river and the formation of swamps as it receded.⁵⁰Ibid., 25. That Max's unabashed participation in slavery and praise of Louisiana's economic accessibility is counterbalanced with fears of impending yellow fever presents a familiar theme.

In a letter dated November 18, 1827, Max described an outbreak of yellow fever presumably brought by steamboat in September.⁵¹Ibid., 51. The disease initially spread among the unacclimated, "new arrivals and the older residents." Six weeks into the epidemic, Max reported that he had fallen victim. Suffering from inflamed eyes and a blackened tongue, he recalled feeling "an unusual accumulation" in his mouth, at which point he "pulled out a large piece of spalted black blood." Soon the blood poured out of his mouth and nose as doctors tried desperately to take his pulse. Max reported that he had "vomited about two sinks full of blood" that day and was failing fast. Miraculously, he made a full recovery, the lone survivor among those infected.⁵²Ibid., 52.

Max's expressed concern for fellow Germans seeking to land in New Orleans during the summer months is also telling. In June 1828, he lamented that during his time in New Orleans, a ship "brought about 120 Germans of diverse ages" who were ill prepared to travel to the interior. Without sufficient money, they were forced to beg while the "heat during and after the flooding of the river…will soon bring about the Yellow Fever." Disheartened, Max knew that his "countrymen, who have come here so hearty and strong from healthy Germany, will fall without a fight as its first victims."⁵³Ibid., 62–63.

When Max's sister Thekla came to America, he suggested that they meet in New York in the late fall and travel to New Orleans by steamship only after the fever season had ended. Despite their careful planning, Max reported the fever had lingered late that summer and was terrorizing New Orleans well into November. He noted that the twenty or so Germans on board decided to immediately travel north "for the sake of the preservation of their health." According to Thekla's account, she and Max retired to their quarters where they held each other and cried—praying the fever would leave them unscathed. Upon their arrival, Max and Thekla heeded the advice of "some experienced Germans" to remain onboard rather than risk entering the city.⁵⁴Ibid., 148. While they survived the ordeal, Max and Thekla's letters emphasized the danger posed to Germans by yellow fever in the Gulf South. The lesson Max's father intended comes through loud and clear—wanderlust had perilous consequences.

The authors of this first period of travel and settlement literature placed more emphasis on personal observation buttressed by hearsay than scientific analysis. Even self-styled naturalists, such as "Duke Paul" and Johan Valentin Hecke, offered little data, aside from notions of yellow fever's limited range from the sea. During the mid-nineteenth century, the "Wissenschafts-popularisierung" (the popularization of science) became more apparent. Just prior to the height of German immigration to the United States, writers would provide scientific evidence that explain earlier observations and explore the presumed relationship between southern climates and German bodies that made them more susceptible to yellow fever.

"Too Far South": Yellow Fever, Race, and German Fears, 1830­–1845

Beginning in the 1830s, there was a perceivable shift from travel and adventure narratives towards settlement guides and treatises on medical geography. Of particular interest were the increasingly prevalent theories of acclimation, as well as the utilization of latitudinal coordinates to pinpoint unhealthy areas for German immigration. The shift in emphasis from dissuading settlement in New Orleans to debating its merits merely as a viable port of entry for Germans settling elsewhere suggests that the unhealthy nature of the climate was increasingly taken for granted.

The most well known German travel and emigration author of the nineteenth century, Gottfried Duden, extolled the virtues of the slave state of Missouri for prospective German immigrants in his Report on a Trip to the Western States of North America (1829).⁵⁵Gottfried Duden, Bericht über eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerikas (Elberfeld, Germany: S. Lucas, 1829). Reprinted three times, his Report became so popular that German authorities feared it might inspire a mass exodus to Missouri.⁵⁶Robyn Burnett and Ken Luebbering, German Settlement in Missouri: New Land, Old Ways (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), 10. Historians have long noted the significance of Duden's Missouri boosterism,⁵⁷Robert Frizell, Independent Immigrants: A Settlement of Hanoverian Germans in Western Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 29; Conevery Bolton Valenčius, Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 37; Richard O’Connor, The German-Americans: An Informal History (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1968), 68–70; Rippley, The German-Americans, 44. but his remarks on the southern limits of German settlement and yellow fever's role in establishing them have been largely ignored. Duden advised his readers to stay north of "settlements at the mouth of the Arkansas [River]," some 325 miles north of New Orleans, as they were "perhaps too far south." The main reason for his admonitions was yellow fever, which he claimed struck the Crescent City "almost every summer."⁵⁸Duden, Bericht über eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerikas, 165–166, 328.

Duden argued that the dangers of yellow fever and other tropical diseases kept Germans from areas in which slavery was most depraved. In the middle states, like Missouri, he contended, slavery was a relatively benign institution, comparing favorably to domestic servitude in Europe, and often in the best interests of the enslaved. The greatest obstacle slaves faced to freedom, Duden believed, was their racial inferiority. He asserted that no amount of education or betterment could undo thousands of years of being exposed to debilitative, and inferior, climates.⁵⁹Ibid., 142–143.

Duden maintained that Germans could not saunter into a tropical climate without prolonged seasoning.⁶⁰Ibid., 328. He cautioned readers not to be enticed by the availability of inexpensive tracts of land where their health would be imperiled. Germans, he argued, should settle in Missouri, preferably near St. Louis.⁶¹Ibid., 328, 330. While he recommended traveling there from New York or some other northeastern port, he conceded that traveling to Missouri by way of New Orleans was feasible, so long as one embarked from Germany no later than "December or January so that they arrive when there is no danger from yellow fever."⁶²Ibid., 332.

Observing that many Europeans survived in cities such as New Orleans seemingly unaffected by diseases such as yellow fever, Duden based his concepts of acclimation and seasoning on a version of racialized climate theory in which racial traits were somewhat mutable.⁶³Ibid., ix–xiv, 110. Seasoning or acclimation attempted to scientifically explain yellow fever's reputation as a strangers' disease. When his methods of acclimation failed and the promise of his Missouri boosterism went unrealized, Duden came to be known in many settlements of the mid- to upper Mississippi River Valley as "Duden der Lügenhund" (Duden the Lying Dog).⁶⁴T.S. Baker, “America as the Political Utopia of Young Germany,” Americana Germanica 1 (1897): 78.

A young Gustav Koerner took exception to Duden's proclamations. As an abolitionist fresh off the boat from Frankfurt in 1833, Koerner would become Illinois's most renowned German son as well as a political confidant and close friend of Abraham Lincoln.⁶⁵Jack Le Chien, “We Must Make Them Understand Lincoln is Our Man,” ed. Molly McKenzie (Bellville, IL: Koerner House Restoration Committee, 2011), 14. In his Illumination of Duden's Report on the Western States of North America, from America (1834), Koerner encouraged the German public to question Duden's observations regarding the health of St. Louis. In particular, he questioned how a city in constant contact with New Orleans, a locality known to harbor "diseases of all kinds, but especially yellow fever," could possibly be considered healthy. Koerner cited longtime residents of St. Louis who confirmed that the health of the city worsened since the advent of regular steamboat traffic to and from New Orleans.⁶⁶Gustav Koerner, Beleuchtung des Duden’schen Berichtes über die westlichen Staaten Nordamerikas, von Amerika aus (Frankfurt, Germany: Karl Körner, 1834), 28. It is important to acknowledge Koerner's role as a booster in Illinois. Both Duden and Koerner were selling the virtues of a place to prospective immigrants. Disagreements aside, they agreed on two principles: the universal condemnation of New Orleans as being host to endemic yellow fever (ungesund) and that Germans who settled too far south did so at their peril.

German-born academic and journalist, Francis Grund, echoed Duden's theory of acclimation in a piece for the Ausberger Allgemeine Zeitung, entitled "Die Colonisation von Liberia." Published in 1840, the article was sectionally biased. As the anti-slavery Grund lived in the North, his article about the colony of Liberia begun by the American Colonization Society offered few kind words for the South's peculiar institution. In his discussion of African Americans' perceptions of Liberia as a "morgue for the blacks," he made a corollary observation of yellow fever and the southern United States. Writing that blacks and "acclimated" residents of the South need not fear "this scourge of Mankind," Grund voiced another reminder that yellow fever was a strangers' disease and that those foreign to the South risked infection and their lives when this "yearly" affliction struck.⁶⁷Duden, Bericht über eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerikas, ix–xiv, 110.

So influential were Grund's opinions of the US that one scholar referred to him as "The Jacksonian Tocqueville."⁶⁸Holman Hamilton and James L. Crouthamel, “A Man for Both Parties: Francis J. Grund as a Political Chameleon,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 97 (1973): 465–484. Alongside observations of culture and politics in his 1835 Die Amerikaner (The Americans), Grund offered a chastising observation of the climate in the Carolina Low Country. He warned that the region was "visited each year by the yellow fever" and insisted that even the interior or rural portions of the Carolinas and Georgia were not safe.⁶⁹Francis Grund, Die Amerikaner: in ihren moralischen, politischen, und gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen (Stuttgart, Germany: J.G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1837), 363.

German observers often suggested what areas were "healthy" for German bodies. Friedrich Schmidt's Account of the Politics and Moral Condition of the United States of North America in the Year 1821 was published shortly after Hecke's first volume. Schmidt was quick to address the mania surrounding German emigration and in his use of medical geography and latitudinal coordinates, he was a pioneer. He offered five observations as to "which areas of North America are especially unhealthy and which states might be beneficial for Europeans."⁷⁰Schmidt, Versuch über den politischen Zustand der Vereinigten Staaten von Nord Amerika im Jahre 1821, 82.

Schmidt wrote that American climates were subject to rapid change and posed a potential threat, but that all areas south of "thirty-six degrees north latitude" were tropical and would "devastate European constitutions." He warned of uncultivated soils and "the reigning diseases" of the "southern and western states" that caused "exhaustion and death among Europeans and Americans." And significantly, he claimed that the "healthiest and most beneficial areas in North America for Europeans, are the states of Pennsylvania, New York, and around the southern parts of Ohio and Indiana."⁷¹Ibid., 82. As the maps accompanying this essay show, these states displayed high rates of settlement among German-born immigrants.

Written fifteen years later by renowned preacher, philologist, and professor of Romantic Languages at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, Ludwig Gottfried Blanc's Handbook of Essential Knowledge of the Nature and History of the Earth and its Inhabitants (1837) was a comprehensive study intended for a broader audience of fellow Germans.⁷²Ludwig G. Blanc, Handbuch des Wissenswürdigsten aus der Natur und Geschichte der Erde und ihrer Bewohner Vol. 3 (Halle, Germany: C.H. Schwetschke und Sohn, 1837). In "The United States of North America" under the subheading of "Climate," Blanc summarized the health of the US landscape. "[T]he East Coast," he wrote, "particularly from 40° South [latitude] is, for the most part, unhealthy, and most so in the southern states." Blanc singled out the "terrible yellow fever" as the "main plague of these areas," adding that in the hotter southern states even the interior was susceptible to its devastation.⁷³Ibid., 471.

Blanc remarked favorably on the salubrity of New England, but claimed that the "interior states, between 36° and 42° are, by far, the most healthy."⁷⁴Ibid., 454. This area included Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and the southern portions of Michigan and Wisconsin where, by 1860, over half of the German-born US population resided. If the western portions of Pennsylvania and New York were included as "interior states," the proportion would rise to roughly three-quarters.⁷⁵Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census 1860a-15 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1864), 621. For Blanc, the yellow fever zone extended down the eastern seaboard from New York City, with an increase in virulence and general unhealthiness the further south one traveled. He was especially critical of the coastal areas from Maryland southward, reserving particular scorn for Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.⁷⁶Blanc, Handbuch des Wissenswürdigsten, 479­–492.

While differing in content and methods from earlier travel and adventure narratives, the settlement guides of 1830–1845 came to very similar conclusions, emphasizing the destructive power of yellow fever and its relation to southern geography. Rather than take a chance on acclimation, it was better to avoid the area altogether. On the eve of the greatest period of German immigration to the United States, prospective immigrants were inundated with warnings about the lower Gulf South, and particularly New Orleans. With the question of where to settle, one question remained: was New Orleans still a viable port of entry for Germans heading for California, Texas, and the upper Midwest?

Just Passing Through: New Orleans, 1845–1860

The emphasis of German writings of the late 1840s and 1850s shifted to discussing the viability of New Orleans as a port of entry for immigrants planning on settling outside the Gulf South. Despite the threat of yellow fever, writers acknowledged New Orleans as an economical port for those heading to the US interior. Even here, there were stipulations, the most damaging of which dealt with the time of year to arrive to avoid yellow fever.

George M. von Ross, an American of German descent and a well-known booster of German immigration to central Texas, wrote several guides. While affirming New Orleans as an economical alternative to ports in the Northeast, Ross, in his 1851 The Emigrants' Handbook, warned that those who sought to immigrate through New Orleans "must avoid landing during the period of July to November" or they would "risk finding [the city] haunted by yellow fever upon their arrival."⁷⁷Ross, Die Auswanderers Handbuch, 404. Books by Gabriel Auguste van der Straten-Ponthoz and Traugott Braume shared Ross's concerns and warnings.⁷⁸Gabriel Auguste van der Straten-Ponthoz, Forschungen uber die Lage der Auswanderer in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nord Amerika (Augsburg, Germany: K. Kollman Publisher, 1846), 79–80. Braume, in particular, suggested that those headed for the interior of Texas were better off landing in Galveston which, despite being host to yellow fever on occasion, he deemed a safer alternative.⁷⁹Traugott Braume, Hand- und Reisebuch für Auswanderer und Reisende nach Nord, Mittel, und Süd-Amerika (Bamberg, Germany: Buchner Publishing, 1853), 612–613.

Established in 1847, the Deutsche Gesellschaft von New Orleans (DGNO) sought to increase German immigration through the Crescent City. It provided inexpensive or free services to those heading to the interior, and tried to protect German immigrants from fraudulent travel "brokers," false baggage handlers, and yellow fever. The organization did not actively recommend New Orleans as a final destination, but aspired to make the city the primary port of entry for German-speakers.⁸⁰Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC), Deutsches Haus Collection 1847–1983 EL 1. 1984 Item 1—Die Deutsche Gesellschaft von New Orleans, Louisiana. 1848–1888.

The DGNO closed its first annual report with an unattributed quotation that eventually found its way into the Central Association of German Emigration and Colonization's 1852 circular "To all who want to emigrate!" It advised prospective German emigrants to:

...remain in the land that nourishes you fairly because you come to a country where climate, language, customs and traditions are quite different from your own. There have been many cases in which immigrants have befallen the bitterest price of woes, regretted the reckless step taken, and who, though often in vain, must beg for the means to return to the homeland.

The circular noted that those who sought "to improve their situation" were "only too often met by a terrible awakening." For "malignant fever is almost inevitable everywhere and is often fatal if the right care cannot be found."⁸¹Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz. Inventory: 441, No. 24, 215. www.t-stoffel.de/QUELL/Quellen/An%20alle%20die%20auswandern%20wollen%202.htm.

While originally conceived as an organization to protect German immigrants from false agents and travel brokers, the DGNO realized quickly that disease posed an even greater threat and understood their "special duty to advise immigrants to schedule their arrival during a time in which the city is free from yellow fever." Further it stressed that "no embarkation from Europe should proceed later than the beginning of May . . . [or] until the end of September."⁸²HNOC, Deutsches Haus Collection 1847–1983 EL 1. 1984 Item 1—Die Deutsche Gesellschaft von New Orleans, Louisiana. 1848–1888.

The data that the DGNO gathered between 1847 and 1860 when juxtaposed against the census figures of 1850 and 1860 explain the settlement patterns of Germans who landed in New Orleans. Of the 233,374 immigrants the society processed, sixty percent boarded steamships upriver upon their arrival. Seventy-five percent of that number chose St. Louis and its surrounding environs as their destination with just over twenty-three percent headed for the Ohio River Valley. The rest set out for Texas and, to a lesser extent, California. The remaining 63,665 were identified as either unsure of their final destination, withheld that information from the society, or had decided to remain in New Orleans for the time being. The society did not track those who migrated after their processing. Given that the German population of Louisiana was 24,614 in 1860—having only grown by 6,727 since 1850—it is safe to assume that the majority of the 63,665 who did not make immediate travel arrangements eventually migrated out of the region. Only five percent of the total German immigration occurred during the peak fever months of July, August, and September and sixty-five percent avoided arriving from the end of May to the first of November.⁸³Ibid.

The majority of German immigrants made arrangements in advance of their arrival to settle in areas deemed "healthy." The timing of their arrival suggests that they heeded the settlement literature's advice and almost unanimously avoided New Orleans during peak yellow fever months even in years when the disease was not epidemic. May, the month immediately preceding the yellow fever season, was the third highest month for German immigration to New Orleans. High numbers in November and December could be explained away by the avoidance of frozen rivers in the North, but seeing immigration peak immediately before and after yellow fever season suggests more. An even clearer picture becomes apparent when we combine data from the DGNO and U.S. Census with the gestalt of the geographic recommendations of the settlement literature (see "Mental Map of Yellow Fever" maps).

Yellow fever and antebellum German perceptions of its hold on the Gulf and Atlantic Coastal South contributed significantly to their avoidance of these areas. Kindled by the vast expanse of the Louisiana Purchase, travel and settlement writing as well as the discourse of medical geography contributed to the popularization of scientific knowledge (Wissenschafts-popularisierung). The American frontier provided economic and scientific opportunity to observers and newcomers brimming with new ideas about the relationship between health and the land. The explosion of European immigration to the United States had an immediate and lasting effect, as German and Irish immigrants moved into US cities seeking a better life.

Germans, in particular, sought out the expanse west of the Appalachians and, if the extent of writing presented in this essay is any indication, they were considerably well informed as to the politics, economics, and health of the Gulf and Atlantic Coastal South. This is not to say that they came prepared. With published accounts of an unknown land in mind and far less money and resources than needed, they arrived in New Orleans by the hundreds of thousands: most of them promptly boarded a steamship and traveled up the Mississippi to what they hoped would be healthier country.

About the Author

Paul Michael Warden is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a visiting scholar in Harvard's Department of the History of Science. His dissertation focuses on how yellow fever shaped the medical imagination and development of antebellum New Orleans. His broader research examines how ecology and geography intersect with period medical and scientific theory within early American history.

Introduction

Early in 1949, Dottie Colson wrote to the National Health Council in New York City for advice on how to start a "real health movement" in her hometown. Colson believed that use of the pesticide DDT in her rural community outside of Claxton, Georgia, was causing grave harm, and that she and her neighbors had a right to be spared its effects. She described her own sensitivity to the chemical, her daughter's unyielding sore throat, the illness that had struck the family's dairy cows, and the loss of their baby chicks and honeybees. The harm to livestock, fowl, and bees, along with an endless stream of doctors' bills, threatened the family with financial ruin. In Colson's telling, DDT was destroying their lives.¹Letter from Mrs. H.J. Colson to The National Health Council, January 31, 1949, Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. More than that, as one of her neighbors put it, DDT was destroying a way of life, as it made small farms unsustainable and eroded the good health and cooperative spirit that were the backbone of rural communities such as theirs.²Letter from Mrs. B.C. Plyler to Hon. Herman Talmadge, August 17, 1950, Folder: Plyler and Colson, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives.

Colson's crusade against DDT began in 1945, the same year the pesticide emerged from the Second World War as an American miracle. First synthesized by an Austrian chemist in the late-nineteenth century, DDT's powers as a pesticide weren't discovered until World War II. By the time the war ended, it was credited with saving millions in Europe and the Pacific theater from insect-borne diseases, and the US Army proclaimed it the "war's greatest contribution to the future health of the world."³"DDT Seen for Public by Spring," Atlanta Journal, August 6, 1945, 18. Just a few months after the war's end in Europe, DDT became commercially available in the US. It was quickly and enthusiastically deployed in liquid and powder form against insect pests across the country, especially in the South, where health departments and agricultural interests hailed it as an authentically American "wonder drug" poised to bring the "magic" it had worked against diseases such as malaria and typhus abroad back home.⁴"Seminole Uses Wonder Drug to Fight Malaria," Atlanta Journal, March 13, 1945; "Danger – DDT," Georgia's Health 25, no. 4 (1945): 4.

But a countervailing narrative of DDT also emerged. Local media warned of DDT's potential to kill not only harmful insects but "the innocent and beneficial" as well, and to upset "the complex balance of nature."⁵"Use Care With DDT, Farmers Are Warned," Atlanta Journal, August 1, 1945, 12. At the same time, citizens like Colson and her neighbors circulated complaints about their personal encounters with the chemical and fought to keep it off their land and out of their homes. As they contacted state officials, local and federal lawmakers, and the pesticide manufacturers, they decried the widespread use of DDT as an infringement on their right to property and livelihood, an un-Christian cause of human suffering based on an irresponsible ignorance of the chemical's harm.

This essay recounts the story of one community's fight against DDT in the years immediately after its introduction to the US market, in order, first, to demonstrate that DDT's reception in this period was more troubled than the chemical's historiography generally allows, and, second, to insert a more complicated story of local American values, beliefs, and ideas about health and environment into the often-told global histories of DDT during and immediately after World War II. The pesticide's use in peacetime raised health and environmental concerns not urgent during wartime. In this new context, scientific knowledge about the chemical's range of effects appeared fragmentary and difficult to synthesize, and varying assessments of DDT's hazards to people and environments became challenging to reconcile. Conversations about the chemical and its use pointed up tensions between the assessment of risk in wartime and in peace; among professionals responsible for individual and public health; and between a lightly regulated industry and the government bodies charged with mitigating the consequences of its products' various uses. As these conversations took place, DDT acquired a layered symbolism: it remained a wartime miracle to most, even as to others it became the tool of a government in service to big-capital interests. Additionally, DDT's widespread, national visibility—fostered by wartime media attention and postwar advertising and promotion—was critical to the symbolism the pesticide acquired, and had paradoxical consequences for its reputation and, potentially, for its persistence on the US market in the decades after the war.

The Problem with Claxton

In the mid-1940s, Dottie Colson and her blacksmith husband Henry, along with daughters Hazel and Dorothy, lived on a small farm off newly paved Highway 280, which paralleled the railroad that ran from Savannah to Cordele. It was an ideal place to live; as Colson's neighbor—and sister—Mamie Ella Plyler put it, "No farm could be more conveniently situated, as we have paved highway outlets to all towns, are on Georgia Power line, mail delivery, telephone, [and] school bus and several passenger buses pass each way daily which take on or let off passengers at our door."⁶Letter from Mrs. B.C. Plyler to Prince Preston, September 7, 1950, Folder: T-47: Toxicology-Economic Poisons-Insecticides-Mrs. Plyler and Colson, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. This folder of letters contains evidence that other Claxton residents shared the sentiments and experiences documented by Colson and Plyler. This evidence includes a petition signed by a group of Claxton residents and pesticide surveys completed by residents. This essay draws predominantly on the letters written by Colson and Plyler, however, as their letters, in particular about a half-dozen very lengthy ones, contain the most detailed accounts of the community's experience. The bulk of these letters are in the records of the Department of Health; very few are in the records of the Department of Agriculture. The existing letters, however, indicate that the Claxton residents wrote to multiple government agencies, at all levels, across the state and in Washington, DC. But the stretch of highway outside of Claxton was not their first choice of residence. In 1942, the US Army had bought the land they then lived on, roughly forty miles southeast of Claxton, to expand Camp Stewart for an antiaircraft artillery training center and prisoner of war facilities.⁷A. M. De Quesada, A History of Georgia Forts: Georgia's Lonely Outposts (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2011), 107–109. Plyler later wrote that they moved with "chin up" in service of their country, even as the place they relocated to "took advantage of this forced exile of families" with inflated land prices that ultimately came with added costs.⁸Letter from Mrs. B.C. Plyler to Prince Preston September 7, 1950.

For Plyler, the problem with Claxton became apparent in March of 1945, when she fell ill. She later recorded that she had developed severe sores in her mouth and throat and a persistent "irritation" of the head that didn't give way until fall. Plyler's husband "B.C." and daughters Betty and Martha suffered similarly. Before long, she noted that their symptoms were seasonal: they set in when the "big land owners" who owned the fields surrounding her home began "spraying" their crops at the end of winter, and they let up when the spraying season ended in October. The sprays and dusts coated everything on the Plyler farm: cow pasture, vegetable garden, fruit trees, chicken coops, open feed boxes and water pans, clothes and bedding hung out on the line, and everything and everyone in the house if the windows were open when the spraying began. Moreover, the Plylers' chickens were dying, and their livestock were sick, too.⁹Ibid.

At first neither Plyler nor Colson knew what was being sprayed over the fields adjacent to their farms. But their suspicion quickly landed on DDT. During the war, DDT had earned fame for its ability to bring epidemics to a dramatic halt or prevent them entirely. It had saved war-torn Naples from typhus, soldiers in the Pacific from malaria, and troops in every theater from bed bugs, lice, and more.¹⁰Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 127–129, 155. National news outlets carried the word that the "magic insect powder" was "one of the greatest scientific discoveries" of the war and nothing short of a "miracle."¹¹"DDT," Washington Post, August 1, 1945, 6; "DDT," Time, June 12, 1944; "Doubts DDT Caused Bay Fish Deaths," Washington Post, August 23, 1945, 3. In Plyler and Colson's home state, local papers echoed the message, calling DDT a "wonder insecticide" and the "Chemical That Saves Millions."¹²"DDT May End Malaria When War Needs End," Atlanta Constitution, May 13, 1945, 5B; Frank Carey, "Chemical That Saves Millions," Augusta Chronicle, December 4, 1944, 7.

Colson and Plyler did not hear about DDT solely in dispatches from abroad. Before the war was over, DDT had been put to use in the Southeast's malaria belt, which included their home state.¹³Despite the fact that malaria rates were at historic lows in the early 1940s, the war had, according to historian Margaret Humphreys, brought new attention to the devastation wrought by the disease abroad, "and the crisis climate spread to the American South." Margaret Humphreys, Malaria: Poverty, Race, and Public Health in the United States (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 140. In 1942, the federal government had established the Malaria Control in War Areas (MCWA) agency, headquartered in Georgia and tasked with creating malaria-free zones around military sites. Two years later, the agency's head convinced Congress to authorize an expansion of their programming; the agency's "Extended Program" wouldn't focus solely on war areas, but on all malaria-prone areas across a dozen southern states. The program's main tool in rural areas was DDT, and in its first year, MCWA sprayed more than half a million homes. In Georgia, the health department boasted that only Arkansas had deployed more DDT.¹⁴"Mosquito Proofing," Georgia's Health 26, no. 8 (1946): 2; "Danger - DDT," Georgia's Health 25, no. 4 (1945): 4. The success helped inspire a second DDT-driven campaign in Georgia, against typhus; the state had among the highest rates of the disease in the nation.¹⁵The Department of Health's anti-typhus campaign was multi-pronged: it involved extermination, elimination of food sources, and rat-proofing of buildings. However, the dusting of rat runs with DDT took center stage in the department's dispatches about the effort. See for example, "DDT's Typhus Role," Georgia's Health 26, no. 8 (1946): 1; "Typhus Takes a Tumble," Georgia's Health 26, no. 5 (1948): 1; "5 Tons of DDT Received Here," Augusta Chronicle, November 21, 1945, 10; "Health Officers Will Spray DDT," Augusta Chronicle, December 2, 1945, 7. Soon, Georgia was also spraying and dusting rat "runs," municipal dumps, dairies, abattoirs, freezer-locker plants, sausage-manufacturing facilities, and more with DDT, all in a continued effort to eliminate the array of insects suspected of carrying infectious disease.¹⁶Communicable Disease Center Technical Development Division, Savannah, Georgia, "Summary of Activities," No. 12, October–December 1947, Headquarters and Branch Reports, Box 2, Record Group 442, The National Archives at Atlanta; Georgia Malaria Control in War Areas Carter Memorial Laboratory Savannah, "Summary of Activities," May 1945, Folder: MCWA Carter Memorial Lab; Savannah, GA 1946, 1945, Historical Files, Box 2, Record Group 442, National Archives at Atlanta.

Surviving health department records do not indicate that Claxton was among the towns where homes or businesses were sprayed as part of the Extended Program, although Claxton residents did record seeing DDT delivered to the local health office (and health officers' own letters confirm this). Surviving records of the state's Department of Agriculture document that Claxton and neighboring Evans County were sprayed with DDT sometime before the end of 1947, likely in an effort to control the white-fringed beetle, a nursery and crop pest.¹⁷Maps Index Cards, DDT Spray Program, March–November 1947, Record Group 13, Subgroup 2, Series 41, Box 1, Department of Agriculture, Georgia Archives; Hal Allen, "Air War Set in Macon Area on White-Fringed Beetle," Macon Telegraph, July 15, 1946, 1; "Battle against Beetle Mapped: Middle Georgia Counties Are Put under Quarantine," Macon Telegraph, Sept 25, 1946, 1. In the years after the war, DDT's uses rapidly evolved from predominantly public-health oriented to predominantly agricultural. In the wetlands and wildlife refuges to the east of Claxton, between Claxton and Savannah, the MCWA's Technical Development Branch laboratory (along with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the US Department of Agriculture) carried out extensive tests on DDT's toxicity to animals in the wild and in the lab.¹⁸United States Public Health Service Malaria Control in War Areas Carter Memorial Laboratory, "Work Project Outlines," 1946, Headquarters and Branch Reports, Box 2, Record Group 442, National Archives at Atlanta; Summary of Activities No. 7, Communicable Disease Center Technical Development Division, Savannah, Georgia, July–September 1946, Headquarters and Branch Reports, Box 2, Record Group 442, National Archives at Atlanta. In the mid-1940s, then, Claxton residents would have been very familiar with both news and sight of DDT spread in and around their communities, whether as a dust or spray, by hand or by plane.

It was airplane application that proved so troubling to the residents of Claxton. As Pete Daniel describes in Toxic Drift, aerial pesticide application in the Deep South first began in the 1920s, when World War I aircraft were retrofitted with dispensers and cranks. Over the course of that decade, using planes to spread insecticides such as calcium arsenate and Paris green became more and more common on big cotton plantations.¹⁹Pete Daniel, Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post-World War II South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press in association with Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 2005), 48–50. Two decades later, the Second World War similarly—and further—propelled the practice as chemical warfare fogging tanks fitted to the bomb racks of fighter planes were filled with DDT emulsions and sprayed over southern Europe, North Africa, and Asia, sometimes dosing entire islands.²⁰See for example Frank M. Snowden, The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900–1962 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 199. After the war, some US farmers bought surplus planes, rigged them with spraying equipment, and coated their crops—sometimes with older pesticides, and sometimes with the new, synthetic ones developed for the war effort, including DDT.²¹Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring, 162; "DDT Available for Civilian Use Early Next Week," Washington Post, July 27, 1945, 1. When Claxton residents saw rigged planes loading pesticides on Highway 280 (which the planes often used as a landing strip), and when they saw the planes flying low to coat the neighboring fields of tomatoes, peanuts, tobacco, and other crops owned by the "big land owners" who lived in town, they quickly concluded the planes were spreading DDT. They had no direct proof that the spray was DDT, but what else, as Plyler put it, could "come over like big clouds of billowy smoke from a locomotive, so dense it casts a shadow as it passes between us and the sun"?²²Letter from Mrs. B.C. Plyler to Prince Preston, September 7, 1950.

In a petition sent to the director of Georgia's Department of Health, the governor, both Georgia senators, and their congressman, a dozen Claxton residents recalled a time "when all the dusting and spraying was done by the shaking of dusts by hand from a flour sack held over plants, or a hand operated sprayer, or an implement mule drawn." Such methods, they added, insured that the "insecticides stayed in the area they were being applied on." But in the new era of farming, they wrote, more and more farmers, especially the wealthier ones who lived in town and cultivated their hundreds of acres from afar, treated their fields using aerial crop dusters and sprayers. With "any breeze blowing," the sprays and dusts blew into small farmers' homes and onto their vegetables, pastures, chicken yards, and laundry lines. This practice, the residents argued, was causing "poisoning of humans" and "endangering life."²³Petition submitted to Georgia Department of Public Health, October 24, 1950, Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. And they were powerless to stop it.

The petition called on the health department to exercise its "authority" to restrict "the uses of, and methods of applying, insecticides in residential areas," based on the fact that the chemicals caused "distressing symptoms, acute suffering and even death in humans and other warm blooded farm animals and fowl."²⁴Ibid. This last charge was not based on personal observations alone, although Colson and Plyler in particular listed such observations in great detail in years' worth of letters to state and federal officials. Rather, it relied just as much on the group's—and especially Colson's and Plyler's—dogged investigations into DDT and other "economic poisons" (as insecticides were called) of the postwar era.²⁵Insecticides in the pre- and immediate postwar period were dubbed economic poisons for the fact that they were known poisonous substances used for economic benefit. The ubiquity of DDT in wartime and postwar news reports and advertising, along with its enthusiastic and widespread use in postwar state public health and agricultural programs, initially focused the Claxton residents' suspicion on DDT as a cause of their suffering. When they began to look into expert literature on the chemical more closely, they easily found evidence that appeared to prove it was harming their health—and they didn't have to dig very deep to find it.

Before drafting the petition with her neighbors, but after failed attempts to enlist the Department of Commerce, the Highway Patrol, and the Civic Aeronautics Administration to halt the aerial spraying of DDT on her land, Dottie Colson had reached out to Lester Petrie, the Director of Industrial Hygiene at the Georgia Department of Public Health.²⁶Dottie Colson's first meeting with Lester Petrie is mentioned in a letter she wrote to him later, in the summer of 1948. Letter from Mrs. Henry J. Colson to Lester Petrie, June 30, 1948, Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. I have found reference to contact with the transportation and trade agencies listed here, but I have not found the letters themselves. Colson hoped that Petrie could analyze samples of soil from her property, so that she could prove, once and for all, what had been sprayed on it—and what was making her sick. Her first letter to him betrayed a clear sense of frustration, as well as the assumption that despite DDT's reputation as a "wonder drug," it and the other economic poisons were not being sprayed for her health, but were certainly harming it. "I have tried to be very nice to all who are interested in using these poisons in an effort to save crops," she told Petrie, "yet when I find they are affecting the health of myself and my family, I feel I am justified in wanting to know more about them.²⁷Letter from Mrs. H.J. Colson to Lester Petrie June 30 1948, Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives.

In ensuing correspondence, Petrie shared department bulletins and press releases with Colson, and Colson, in turn, shared state laws and information she collected from scientific journals, private physicians, insecticide manufacturers, and "reliable farm papers."²⁸Letter from Mrs. H.J. Colson to Dr. G.D. Lunsford, July 12, 1948, Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. Petrie engaged in an ongoing pursuit of detailed information on the toxicity of the new economic poisons, DDT included, as evidenced by the countless letters he wrote to manufacturers and federal scientists asking for safety data. Despite this shared cause, however, Petrie very quickly reached the limits of his patience with Colson's demands—not only for information, but for antidotes, investigations, and state enforcement of safer spraying practices. To Colson, it was the health department's duty to protect the health of every Georgia resident. To Petrie, his duty was to preserve the health of the state by encouraging practices and policies based on the most recent scientific evidence. And there simply was no evidence of a threat to the state's health.

However, in the case of individual complaints about the newer economic poisons, Petrie found himself vexed. The chemicals' rapid commercial release after the war and the confidential nature of their wartime development meant that he had limited access to information about their safety and use; moreover, most of the information he did have access to, on DDT in particular, reflected the health and safety standards of military, not civilian use. He certainly had no antidotes, and he had only limited powers of enforcement over insecticide use.²⁹These were provided in the "Economic Poisons Act," adopted in 1950 to regulate the sale, distribution, and transportation of new insecticides and application devices and enforced by the Department of Agriculture. He did have the power to investigate health threats, but aside from the Claxton complaints, no evidence suggested anything to investigate. Neither wartime research nor DDT's extensive use in the campaigns against malaria and typhus in Georgia had indicated any harm to health. The sole evidence comprised a series of case reports of DDT poisonings and deaths published across a range of US and European medical journals and all attributed to extraordinarily high doses of the insecticide. In one report, a group of starving war prisoners mistook DDT for flour and baked bread with it; those who ate the most bread suffered lasting neurological damage, but all survived.³⁰Richard M. Garrett, "Toxicity of DDT for Man," Journal of the Medical Association of Alabama 17, no. 2 (1947): 74-76. Petrie could find no specific evidence that an incidental, ongoing, exposure like that faced by the residents of Claxton should cause any individual harm—even as Colson and Plyler assured him that the many physicians they consulted were sure that insecticides were behind their ill health.

"I have a great deal of sympathy for Mrs. Colson because of her alleged problems with regard to the killing of her bees, her personal hypersensitiveness to some of the dusts," Petrie wrote to a colleague in Washington, DC, but he found it suspicious that the "only" other complaint about DDT came from her sister.³¹See for example Letter from Lester Petrie to H.N. Graning, March 4, 1949, Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. Department of Health files indicate that this was not true. To Petrie, the Claxton health problems were "all in their own minds."³²Letter from Dr. L. Petrie to Dr. G.G. Lunsford, August 19, 1948, Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. Over and over, state officials dismissed Colson's and her neighbors' claims about DDT and other insecticides. And yet the complaints the Claxton residents made echoed the DDT cautions and warnings expressed in news coverage of the chemical, and throughout government and scientific reports, documents, and publications on DDT. As one news clipping service noted, "not a few" of the tens of thousands of DDT-related articles published just after the war "cautioned the public against its sinister and unknown dangers."³³H.H. Stage, "Facts and Fallacies About DDT," Mosquito News 6, no. 1 (1946): 1. Many of these admonitions came from official sources and carried the message that DDT was a toxic chemical potentially destructive of nature and harmful to humans.

"Double-Edged Sword"

Such concerns were not hidden. When the Washington Post announced, on its front page, the US Army War Production Board's decision to allow the sale of surplus DDT to civilians in 1945, the article's first sentence informed readers that the Board "warned against 'use of it to upset the balance of nature.'"³⁴"DDT Available for Civilian Use Early Next Week," Washington Post, 1. The second sentence spoke of hazards to users and risks associated with DDT residues on products (even as the article then went on to promise the chemical's future use in paints, plaster, and construction materials to make homes insect-proof). A month after Time magazine enumerated DDT's "amazing" properties, it ran an article, "DDT Warning," describing the "poisoning symptoms" produced in laboratory animals in "small doses"—shivers, paralysis, and occasionally death—along with evidence that the poison was "cumulative." DDT, the article concluded, "is 'a definite health hazard.'"³⁵"DDT Warning," Time, August 7, 1944. The "double-edged sword" served as a popular metaphor for DDT, a weapon that would "rid your home of mosquitoes, flies, and vermin, but the price may turn out to be high in human health and life."³⁶Jane Stafford, "Insect War May Backfire," Science News Letter, August 5, 1944, 90; Bob Jones, "DDT: Handle with Care," Better Homes and Gardens, November 1945, 10.

Local coverage did not always mirror the national news outlets. The Atlanta Journal, Atlanta Constitution, and Augusta Chronicle openly discussed DDT's risks and benefits, but the Macon Telegraph did not report on DDT until it was used against the White Fringed Beetle. The Savannah Morning News largely limited its coverage to developments in DDT research at the local MCWA branch. Nonetheless, many of the cautionary themes found in national reporting appeared in local media, including the double-edged sword. An Augusta Chronicle editorial compared DDT to the atomic bomb, not to convey its impressive nature (as DDT ads often did), but to emphasize that it "kills the innocent and beneficial as well as the obnoxious…and kills a lot of things which we do not want to kill."³⁷Editorial, "Use DDT Intelligently," Augusta Chronicle, August 24, 1945, 4. Other reports made DDT's threat to nature even clearer. News reports in Georgia and neighboring states warned that "a single concentrated application destroys birds"; "even dilute applications are dangerous to fish"; and that, since the pesticide might be killing Georgia's wrens, robins, and mocking birds, "perhaps it would be just as well to leave DDT on probation for a while."³⁸"DDT Available for Home Use within 30 Days, Agencies Say," Atlanta Journal, August 22, 1945, 5; Editorial, "Poisoning the Birds," Atlanta Journal, November 14, 1946; "DDT and Fish," Augusta Chronicle (Reprint from The Columbia (S.C.) State), July 12, 1947, 4. Papers quoted the Tennessee Valley Authority's health director saying that DDT's "potentialities" to cause "biological imbalance are very considerable."³⁹"DDT May End Malaria When War Needs End," Atlanta Constitution; "DDT Insecticide Destroys Pests," Augusta Chronicle, June 3, 1945, 5B.

Channing Cope, farm editor and columnist for the Atlanta Constitution, vividly captured ambivalence toward DDT's release. When he brought home his first containers of the poison, Cope spread an emulsion on his home's doors, windows, walls, cracks, and crevices; on the shoulders of his cat Dinty; the back of his pig Pinky; the throats and legs of his mules; and the walls of his milking barn. As a final test, he coated his Scotch terrier with DDT dust. The next morning he was convinced: DDT was a wonder, but it also frightened him. For "we must remember, too, that DDT will kill the bees and that means that it will kill the clover (which means, too, that it will kill off our livestock). It will destroy the fruit crops which are dependent on the bee for pollenization! It will kill of most of the flowers for the same reason and will wipe out many of our vegetables." It's a great "tool for our betterment," he concluded, but it "has the power to ruin us."⁴⁰Channing Cope, "DDT Experiment Proves Successful," The Atlanta Constitution, August 29, 1945, 7. This was no minor warning from the great popularizer of the insidious kudzu vine. Derek H. Alderman, "Channing Cope and the Making of a Miracle Vine," Geographical Review 94, no. 2 (2004): 157–177.

Cope's worries about pollinators formed part of a common refrain about DDT. "Farmers, truck growers, and victory gardeners," advised a Georgia health department engineer, should "wait and see" what agricultural experts ultimately decided about DDT's "potential to destroy…bees and other pollen carriers," before using it on their own land.⁴¹Steed, "Play Safe with DDT," Atlanta Journal Magazine, November 4, 1945, 22–23. The state entomologist ran notices that DDT "might have a deadly effect on Georgia's bee industry."⁴²"Use Care with DDT, Farmers Are Warned," Atlanta Journal, August 1, 1945. Atlanta papers reported complaints of Florida beekeepers about DDT spray programs—and that Georgia beekeepers were "disturbed" that "DDT kills bees as readily as roaches."⁴³Steed, "Play Safe with DDT," Atlanta Journal Magazine, 22–23; "Macdill to Test DDT for Mosquitoes," Atlanta Journal, August 5, 1945, 12. Such warnings, crucial to Georgia agriculture, were far from buried: "DDT Kills Bees, Other Insects, Helpful to Man," ran an Augusta Chronicle front-page headline in August of 1945.⁴⁴A.P., "DDT Kills Bees, Other Insects Helpful to Man," Augusta Chronicle, August 28, 1945, 1.

Writing to Petrie from her home in Claxton, Plyler said she had read that the Georgia Beekeepers Association's vice president attributed the death of his bees to insecticides sprayed on a field near his home.⁴⁵Letter from Mrs. B.C. Plyler to Lester Petrie, December 4, 1950, Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. The loss was bad enough, but Plyler also saw something more egregious embedded in DDT's harm to beneficial insects: a form of economic injustice. It simply wasn't right, in her view, "to kill one man's bees to make another man's peanuts."⁴⁶Ibid. Colson didn't need proof from the papers to argue that the poisoning of bees had far-reaching implications. "Half" of her family's bees had died since the neighboring landowners began spraying DDT, and because of bees' dual roles as honey producers and pollinators, the Colsons' ability to make a living was compromised.⁴⁷Letter from Mrs. H.J. Colson to Lester Petrie, June 30, 1948; Letter from Mrs. H.J. Colson to The National Health Council. Colson, too, saw something more egregious and injurious to livelihood in DDT's insect-killing powers. She had become certain, through her own illness, that "any poison strong enough to kill or damage honey bees is surely strong enough to affect people who are susceptible to such things."⁴⁸Letter from Mrs. H.J. Colson to Lester Petrie, June 30, 1948. And, noted Plyler, "How about the honey after the insecticide was blown all over it? Somebody ate it."⁴⁹Letter from Mrs. B.C. Plyler to Lester Petrie, December 4, 1950.

Federal DDT experiments conducted at the Savannah River Migratory Wildlife Refuge a few years earlier had focused expressly on the chemical's effects on bees (along with other insects, reptiles, and birds).⁵⁰"Work Project Outlines 1946," United States Public Health Service Malaria Control in War Areas Carter Memorial Laboratory, Headquarters and Branch Reports, Box 2, Record Group 442, National Archives at Atlanta. Bees warranted special attention because they were, as one MCWA bulletin reflecting on the Extended Program put it, "so vitally concerned in the pollination of so many commercial crops."⁵¹1944–45 Malaria Control in War Areas, Federal Security Agency, US Public Health Service, Headquarters and Branch Reports, Box 2, Record Group 442, National Archives at Atlanta. Even DDT-maker Monsanto expressed reservations about the chemical's "shadowy side"—meaning its detrimental effects on bees.⁵²"Monsanto Makes DDT," Reprint from Monsanto Magazine, DDT, Vol. 1, September 1944, Folder: DDT Reports Vol 1 & 2, Box 3, Record Group 442, National Archives at Atlanta. Despite citizens' letters as well as government scientists' and manufacturers' acknowledgements of the problem, Georgia's health department responded with Machiavellian reassurances. To a Georgia man concerned about consuming honey in a region where cotton plants had been sprayed "following heavy poisoning schedules," Petrie replied that he had nothing to worry about—but not because the poisons weren't harmful.⁵³Letter from Oscar E. Cole to State Department of Health, August 29, 1949, Folder: Toxicology – TEPP, DDT, ETC. Economic Poisons, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. The plants were likely sprayed with DDT or benzenehexachloride and sulphur, Petrie responded, and the DDT in particular was so toxic to honey bees that the bee feeding on such plants "does not even get back to the hive."⁵⁴Letter from Lester Petrie to Oscar E. Cole, August 29, 1949, Folder: Toxicology – TEPP, DDT, ETC. Economic Poisons., Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. The public didn't have to worry about consuming the toxic spray carried by bees, that is, precisely because the spray's extreme toxicity to bees acted as a safety barrier protecting humans from consuming the same poison.

Such twisted reassurances had little effect on Colson and Plyler, both of whom saw themselves (and in Colson's case, her daughters) as uniquely susceptible to DDT-induced illness. From existing letters, it's unclear if this is how they felt from the start, or whether they developed this idea in response to official dismissals of their claims, or in response to what they read in the DDT-related literature they acquired. As local health director W.D. Lundquist put it, by 1949 they had amassed "volumes of articles, pamphlets and practically all information available on the subject of D.D.T.," likely giving them better access to information than he had.⁵⁵Letter from Dr. W.D. Lundquist to Dr. L. Petrie, June 25, 1949, Folder T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. When Lundquist met with Claxton residents and reviewed their collected materials, he found himself in the same information vacuum that posed such a problem for Petrie. He noted that while most of the articles and reports in Colson's and Plyler's possession stated that DDT was dangerous, and could be uniquely harmful to those who were sensitive, "none of them actually point out [specific] instances nor can I find what D.D.T. is supposed to do in the way of symptoms in the sensitive."⁵⁶Ibid. The contents of Colson's and Plyler's collected materials can be reconstructed from their letters, and included articles from the Progressive Farmer, other farm papers, Georgia newspapers, pamphlets from manufacturers, government releases and bulletins, and journal articles.

The scientific literature contained frustratingly oblique references to individual variability in susceptibility to DDT: experiments demonstrated that the pesticide killed some rat ectoparasite species but not others, and studies on lab rodents had shown that individuals of the same species could be susceptible to DDT while others were not.⁵⁷"Program Information," n.d. (1950–1953), Headquarters and Branch Reports, Box 3, Record Group 442, National Archives at Atlanta; Manuscript: Acute and Subacute Toxicity of DDT, June 21, 1944, Folder: Woodard, G., Nelson, AA., and Calvery, H.C., "Acute and Subacute Toxicity of DDT," A1 10, Box 12, Record Group 88, National Archives at College Park. Such studies offered little guidance to Lundquist and Petrie, precisely because they had emerged from a scientific paradigm developed to ensure the safety of industrial workers exposed to chemicals in high, ongoing workplace doses; their conclusions were a puzzle when applied "outside of the factory," as historian Linda Nash has observed.⁵⁸Linda Lorraine Nash, "Purity and Danger: Historical Reflections on the Regulation of Environmental Pollutants," Environmental History 13, no. 4 (2008): 651–658. Industrial hygiene, or toxicological, experiments on animals sought to determine the chemical level a species safely "tolerated" without causing debilitating or permanent injury or death; they left no room for individual-level intolerance, apart from allergies. Evidence determined lethal doses and carcinogenic doses—not, necessarily, a chemical's more subtle or rare effects, which were of little interest to a profession responsible for ensuring workers' productivity.

Protection for Health and Property

In disbelief that government health workers could know so little about the chemicals that were their charge, Plyler pointed Lundquist and Petrie directly to literature from DDT makers that stated that "repeated exposure may without warning cause prolonged susceptibility to very small doses or exposures."⁵⁹Letter from Mrs. B.C. Plyler to Dr. L. Petrie, December 14, 1950, Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. Lundquist replied that he "sincerely believed" that insecticide dusts could irritate "some people," but his doubt that Claxton residents had received high enough doses to "poison" them reflected his allegiance to the tenets of industrial hygiene, a profession responsible for, but without answers to, the problem of the public's chemical exposures.⁶⁰Letter from Dr. W.D. Lundquist to Dr. G.G. Lunsford, July 17, 1948, Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. Instead, Lundquist and others resorted to character judgment—and misogyny. The health department's director of local operations, Guy Lunsford, attributed Colson and Plyler's symptoms to their "overanxious" nature and believed that Colson in particular was motivated by money, since she had reportedly spoken with a lawyer who suggested she had a winnable case.⁶¹Ibid. Lundquist nonetheless questioned all the local doctors he could find, in a quest to uncover and confirm other reports of "hypersensitive" individuals—but he found none.⁶²Ibid. He wrote to Petrie in frustration in August 1948: "I wish that the State Department could have these cases tested for sensitivity to these chemicals so as to prove or disprove once and for all their claims and convictions."⁶³Letter from Dr. W.D. Lundquist to Dr. L. Petrie, August 13, 1948, Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. But such tests did not exist, and there was nothing in the literature, as the health experts saw it, to prove or disprove Colson's and Plyler's claims.

In fact, the lack of substantive and applicable evidence about the harmful effects of exposure to the new economic poisons was consuming a sizable portion of health department energy. Petrie may have dismissed Colson's and Plyler's claims in correspondence with his colleagues, but his files indicate that his division of the state health department was engaged in an ongoing, though often fruitless, campaign for clues and data about insecticide toxicity from other state health departments and from insecticide manufacturers themselves. He wrote to the US Army's Industrial Hygiene lab for help with the "problem of poisoning caused by organic insecticides," figuring that since so many of them were developed as war gas poisons the Army could share its experience "combating and investigating" them. (The organic insecticides included the organochlorines, such as DDT, and the organophosphates, which included parathion.) Petrie asked the USDA for every piece of information on labeling guidelines. He wrote to chemical companies, asking them to add tracers to their insecticides so state health officers could figure out which sprays were causing which illnesses—and which deaths. A response from Monsanto's medical director summed up the reason why the companies would never do this: it would cost too much.⁶⁴Letter from R. Emmett Kelly to Dr. L. Petrie, August 4, 1950, Folder: Toxicology Economic Poisons-General-1951, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives.

Petrie also wrote to other state health departments to collect information on poisonings and related laws. The result was a collection of harrowing stories of insecticide poisonings that he kept in his files: the woman who died within hours after eating blackberries bordering a recently sprayed cotton field; the deaths of pilots who flew cotton-dusters; the tenant farmer found collapsed in a sprayed tobacco field; the ten-year-old boy who died after swigging from a whiskey bottle he found in the crotch of a tree, not knowing it contained pesticide; the two children who died after making mud pies with "fruit spray"; the six-year-old boy who died when "plant spray" spilled on his leg; and many others.⁶⁵News clipping: "Spray Poison Kills Two Tots," March 17, 1954, Folder: Toxicology-General, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives; News clipping: "Poisonous Spray Kills Boy 6," n.d., Folder: Toxicology-General, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives.

The sprays in these cases were sometimes identified, sometimes not. Those most often responsible for the worst poisonings didn't contain DDT, but parathion and TEPP (tetraethyl pyrophosphate). The latter insecticides emerged, like DDT, from wartime research, but they belonged to a different class of far more acutely toxic chemicals; toxicity tests showed that a single drop of TEPP in the eye could be fatal. Spared the fanfare of DDT, their harms went largely unnoticed by the public—and appear to have been mapped onto DDT instead. When Petrie sent a safety bulletin to local health departments and county agents with detailed warnings about the "new insect sprays," the resulting local news stories carried headlines such as "Farmers Warned DDT is Harmful"—but rarely referred to the other insecticides by name.⁶⁶News Clippings: "Economic Poisons Bulletin," November 1950, Folder: N-16: Newspaper Clippings-Insecticides, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. News items based on Petrie's bulletin ran in the Covington News, Quitman Free Press, Polk County Times, Millen News, Cobb County Times, Hawkinsville Dispatch and News, Jesup Sentinel, Dalton News, Early County News, Cedartown Standard, Morgan County News, Abbeville Chronicle, Daily Tifton Gazette, Carroll County Georgian, and elsewhere. When the other insecticides were mentioned, they often were described in comparison to DDT: one percent of parathion was described as more potent than a five percent DDT preparation; toxaphene was described as sixteen times as toxic as DDT.⁶⁷News Clipping: "Despite Warnings of Government Agencies Deadlier Chemicals for Insecticides Are Released Each Year," Durham Herald, NC, October 20, 1949, Folder: N-16: Newspaper Clippings-Insecticides, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. As a household name, DDT became the touchstone for the new class of synthetic economic poisons, which had paradoxical implications for its reputation: the worst traits of more acutely toxic insecticides were projected onto it even as it was described as relatively safe among the new insecticides.

Petrie's preoccupation with the acutely poisonous organophosphate insecticides offered another reflection of the professional norms of industrial hygiene. The pesticides causing rapid onset of symptoms and death captured the attention of the state health department—especially since some had the capacity to be fatal in strikingly small doses. DDT caused few deaths, and while toxic to the nervous system, required a very large dose before symptoms of poisoning set in. Yet unlike the organophosphates, DDT accumulated in bodies, building up in fat tissue and leading to scientific concerns that its toxic effects compounded with accumulation. This property was known, and publicized, from early on: Time had notified readers in 1944 that DDT's "poisoning" properties were "cumulative."⁶⁸"DDT Warning," Time. The Atlanta Journal Magazine, too, warned readers against getting DDT dust or solution on their hands precisely because the insecticide's toxic effects to humans "may be cumulative."⁶⁹Steed, "Play Safe with DDT," 22–23. As studies of lab rodents and dogs had shown, DDT also was passed along in milk. Colson told Petrie these properties had her very worried. From what she read, she knew the farm's eggs and milk contained DDT.⁷⁰Letter from Mrs. H.J. Colson to Lester Petrie, January 29, 1949, Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. From what she experienced, she knew DDT had the capacity to cause illness, because of the days when insecticide blew into her sister's cow lot while her children milked. When they drank the milk, their mouths and throats "burned, hurt, and swelled."⁷¹Letter from Mrs. B.C. Plyler to R.H. Fetz, April 27, 1951, Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives.

Representing the professional norms of industrial hygiene and employing the rationale of proven-benefits-to-the-many outweighing reported-risks-to-the-few, state health officials responded to Colson and Plyler. Regional medical director Lundquist said that he had had the opportunity to "closely observe the effects of DDT in five different counties" and had never heard of anyone saying that DDT made them sick. Spraying had occurred in fifty other Georgia counties, affecting "hundreds of thousands of people," commented Lundquist, and "several hundred men in the State" worked as sprayers, "who are thoroughly covered or soaked with the chemicals at the end of each day's operations."⁷²Letter from Dr. W.D. Lundquist to Mr. G.O. Hohwer August 19, 1948, Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. If DDT hadn't made them sick, it couldn't make anyone sick. Petrie, to prove the same point, sent Colson an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association describing the hundreds of thousands of lives saved when the US Army dusted the people of Naples in 1943. "There were no serious cases of impaired health," he told her, "nor any deaths reported as being attributed to DDT as a result of this experience." The same message was conveyed in a Federal Security Agency release he shared with her, issued after a 1949 national scare about DDT in milk, which reminded Americans that DDT had "contributed materially to the general welfare of the world" without "ever" causing human sickness due to the DDT itself.⁷³Federal Security Agency Public Health Service, Washington, DC Memorandum, April 1, 1949, Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives. Generally, federal documents on the pesticide, such as this one, attributed DDT-related illnesses to the solvents used to emulsify it, and not the DDT itself. Colson's and Plyler's assertions of individual risk were invalidated by state and even global benefit, and by the fact that so many people had withstood high-dose exposures seemingly without incident.

For Colson, however, there were a few problems with this reasoning. Population statistics and the experiences of spray operators that suggested DDT was safe meant nothing in the case where someone was uniquely sensitive to the chemical—as Colson believed she and her daughters were. "It is unfortunate indeed," Colson told Petrie, "to be one of the proven few that DDT is so very poisonous to."⁷⁴Letter from Mrs. H.J. Colson to Lester Petrie, January 29, 1949. Without directly articulating it, she expressed a sentiment then circulating among experts discussing DDT's widespread use after the war: as the chemical's deployment shifted from military to civilian use, its benefits and risks needed weighing anew, but all too often, this calculation was not done.⁷⁵Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring, 158–164. Risks tolerable in wartime were often intolerable in times of peace, and she counted her own insecticide sensitivity among the latter. Moreover, as one of the "few," Colson felt she was being asked to sacrifice her health for the convenience and wealth of others. She and her family had readily given up their former home and moved to Claxton to make room for Camp Stewart's expansion. But by failing to stop the spread of insecticides over her land, her government, she felt, was remiss in its duty to guarantee all a "reasonable amount of protection for health and property," she wrote. "I believe the Constitution gives us this much."⁷⁶Letter from Mrs. H.J. Colson to Mr. J.G. Townsend, August 20, 1949, Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives.

Plyler, meanwhile, voiced an additional objection to health department dismissals. In years of protest against DDT, she had consulted with countless doctors, written to agencies in Washington, visited with representatives of chemical companies, and interviewed people all over southeastern Georgia.⁷⁷Letter from Mrs. B.C. Plyler to Prince Preston, September 7, 1950. Her inquiries turned up plenty of stories of DDT skepticism and harm: to the boy who died from eating sprayed berries; the pastor and the farmer whose cows were killed; the cotton farmer who refused to use it anymore; the merchants who said insecticides made them sick; and the war veteran who told her that DDT "might not have hurt the guy putting it out but sure hurt the ones who had to live in it."⁷⁸Memorandum, Evans County, by Guy G. Lunsford, n.d., Folder: T-47: Toxicology–Economic Poisons–Insecticides–Mrs. Plyler & Colson, Box 3, Record Group 26, Subgroup 4, Series 21, Georgia Archives; Letter from Mrs. B.C. Plyler to Lester Petrie, December 4, 1950. Not every story Plyler cited contained a clear reference to DDT, but DDT was the only chemical mentioned by name in any story. Not every story Plyler collected contained a clear reference to DDT, but it was the sole insecticide she mentioned by name. She came to doubt the assertion that hundreds of thousands of people had been exposed to DDT "without having registered any complaint."⁷⁹Ibid. Instead, she believed their complaints simply hadn't been registered.

A Form of Economic Injustice

Over the course of their five years of letter writing, Plyler became increasingly invested in publicizing not just the harms of DDT, but the tragedy of postwar shifts in the economy and governance that her fight against the chemical had revealed. The economic poisons may have protected crops, but this agricultural advantage came at a significant cost to the health of livestock and people. When a small land owner felt this effect, she argued, he abandoned the hazardous substances. The "big land owner," by contrast, lived in town, never felt the effects and shielded himself from insecticide-related losses. "He sends out a crop dusting plane…he doesn't even risk a mule in it. If his mule got sick or died, he would be the loser, but if the negro or poor white man is made sick" he never has to pay the bill. Georgia, it was clear to her, had three classes—"the rich man, his hands, and the little land owner"—and only the first of these stood to survive. The others would "soon be extinguished if they and all their possessions are covered with insecticides beginning in March and continuing into October every year."⁸⁰Letter from Mrs. B.C. Plyler to Lester Petrie, December 4, 1950. Plyler hoped someday to tell this story in a series of articles for national publication. She had already decided on a title: "This Is Georgia."⁸¹Letter from Mrs. B.C. Plyler to Prince Preston, September 7, 1950. I have no evidence that Plyler wrote professionally, but according to the 1940 census, she completed two years of high school. Her activism—and that of her sister—may be a function of their Southern Methodist upbringing: ancestry records accessible online suggest that their paternal grandfather was married in the Sand Hill Methodist Church in Tattnall, GA. On Southern Methodist women's tradition of involvement in social reform movements, see Paul Harvey, Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 75–77; Samuel S. Hill and Charles H. Lippy, Encyclopedia of Religion in the South (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005), 845.

In a letter to Georgia governor Herman Talmadge in 1950, Plyler wrote that her battle against DDT had convinced her that her government had abandoned its "Christian" duty to its citizens. Families were being "herded out of God's open country"—in her case, first to serve the war effort, and now to suit big landowners. She described a cooperative way of life that existed only on small farms, and that depended on conditions that allowed parents, children, cows, pigs, chickens, and vegetable and flower gardens to thrive. Agents of the state had abetted big landowners in eliminating the "happy experiences of comradeship from which many of the fundamentals needed in the making of happy, useful citizens have their beginning," she told Governor Talmadge. "Can we hope to enjoy good health in Georgia and have this happiest opportunity?" she asked. Or must we "be poisoned to death in our own homes?"⁸²Letter from Mrs. B.C. Plyler to Hon. Herman Talmadge, August 17, 1950. Underline in original.

Plyler's letter spoke to larger changes. Drawn by abundant natural resources and state governments promising low-wage and non-unionized labor and cheap (or free) land, military installations sprang up and expanded, and a host of industrial operations migrated into the South.⁸³James C. Cobb, Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936–90 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993). Rural population declined while the farms that remained grew larger.⁸⁴Christopher J. Bosso, Pesticides and Politics: The Life Cycle of a Public Issue (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), 23. The new economic poisons accelerated the shift to monoculture farms, a trend that came with the promise that industrial agriculture was the best way to feed the nation—and the world.⁸⁵Ibid., 26–30. Plyler longed for a sense of neighborliness that she felt was the hallmark of small farms. As Christopher Bosso notes, pre-war biological pest control depended upon a cooperative ethos among farmers and an "active government role." In the postwar era, chemical pest control favored a farmer's "individualized mastery of his particular chunk of nature, a mastery requiring little, if any, government meddling."⁸⁶Ibid., 32. By spraying, each farmer had no need to think beyond the borders of his or her own land. Plyler perceived a flaw in this logic: as new chemicals promised benefits for the many, they introduced threats into the shared physical environment in a cultural setting which exhorted everyone to think only of themselves. Plyler hoped for a government that would act as a check on these transformations, as there was no law or regulation protecting individuals from sprays that drifted, unwanted, onto their own land. When Congress passed the Federal Insecticide Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) in 1947, however, it simply placed government in the role, as Bosso has put it, of "authoriz[ing] the manufacture, sale, and use of products carrying potential hazards to the public health and environment."⁸⁷Ibid., xii. Plyler certainly would have agreed with the characterization that DDT poisoned people in their own homes and that government sanctioned the practice instead of stopping it.

Not all the "billowing clouds" blowing over the small farms of Claxton were DDT. By the time Plyler wrote her plea to Governor Talmadge, she and her neighbors had confirmed that neighboring property owners were using DDT—but they were also using pesticides containing parathion, copper, and arsenic. Plyler's most recent doctor's visit had led to a diagnosis of arsenic poisoning.⁸⁸The Claxton residents had found a label from an insecticide container that a local merchant claimed to have sold to the "big land owners;" it contained 20% DDT, but the merchant also reported selling the owners other sprays, too. Letter from Mrs. B.C. Plyler to Prince Preston, September 7, 1950. The health department responded to the diagnosis by launching an investigation involving clinical and laboratory testing—something the Claxton residents had requested all along. Petrie's office sampled well water and urine, testing parents, children, and neighbors. The tests came back negative.

Later in that fall of 1950, Colson experienced her old symptoms on a visit to the Claxton health office, and a neighbor told her that she had seen a leaking container of DDT and chlordane—another new economic poison (and relative of DDT)—on the office's back porch. Colson's conviction that DDT was at the root of her community's problems returned. So did Plyler's, after a similar experience visiting a shop in a nearby town. Their conviction was about more than symptoms. To the Claxton residents, DDT was not just a health threat, but a symbol of a changed nation, a distant entity that did not have their small-farming community's best interests in mind, cared nothing for the sacrifices it had made during the war, and now prioritized big-capital interests over those of hardworking citizens, in the process destroying a way of life.

An Unexplored Archive

Early in 1945, before DDT had become available to the American public, The Saturday Evening Post ran an article on its discovery, battle victories, and inherent dangers, written by Brigadier General James Stevens Simmons, chief of preventive medicine for the US Army. It was Simmons who called DDT "the War's greatest contribution to the future health of the world," and while he wrote that its myriad possible benefits were "sufficient to stir the most sluggish imagination," he also described the chemical's "alarming" toxicity and its potential to "disturb vital balances in the animal and plant kingdoms."⁸⁹James Stevens Simmons, "How Magic Is DDT?," Saturday Evening Post, January 1, 1945, 18–20. Despite its tempered tone, Simmons' article has been cited repeatedly by historians, as well as other scholars and writers, as evidence of the American public's wholehearted reception of DDT as the US emerged from the war—and for the better part of the two decades that followed.⁹⁰See for example James Whorton, Before Silent Spring: Pesticides and Public Health in Pre-DDT America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 248; Russell, War and Nature, 124; Thomas Dunlap, DDT, Silent Spring, and the Rise of Environmentalism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008); Will Allen, The War on Bugs (White River Junction, VT.: Chelsea Green Publisting, 2008), 171. As historian William Cronon has written, "Until 1962"—the year Rachel Carson's pesticide exposé Silent Spring was published—"Americans were far more inclined to regard DDT as a miracle than as a menace."⁹¹Dunlap, DDT, Silent Spring, and the Rise of Environmentalism, x.

Several historians who have studied DDT's story in depth, including Thomas Dunlap, Edmund Russell, and David Kinkela, acknowledge the ambivalence of Simmons's account.⁹²Russell, War and Nature, 125; Dunlap, DDT, Silent Spring, and the Rise of Environmentalism, x; David Kinkela, DDT and the American Century: Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide That Changed the World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 31. And yet, the historiographic conclusion that has emerged from analyses of DDT discourse in the postwar years is that early DDT cautions and warnings were quickly abandoned in light of the pesticide's promise as a tool of technological modernization in the context of postwar exuberance.⁹³Kinkela, DDT and the American Century, 7. Dunlap claims that for a decade after DDT came on the commercial market, "only two groups paid much attention to it: the economic entomologists who recommended sprays and the public health officials who regulated residues on food."⁹⁴Dunlap, DDT, Silent Spring, and the Rise of Environmentalism, 29. And Russell argues that debates among experts about how best to weigh the benefits and risks of DDT as it moved from military to civilian use were hidden from view of the public.⁹⁵Russell, War and Nature, 158–164.

The letters written by the residents of Claxton, Georgia, suggest that this was not the case. There's no doubting the enthusiasm displayed for DDT immediately after the war, when headlines called it "dynamite" and "magic"; popular writers dreamed of a day without "roaches in the cupboard" and "ants in the sugar"; and drugstores sold out of their stock before the chemical even arrived.⁹⁶John K. Terres, "Dynamite in DDT," New Republic, March 25, 1946, 415–416; Simmons, "How Magic Is DDT?."; Truman McMahan, "DDT," Colorado County Citizen (TX), September 27, 1945; "Small Amount of DDT Put on Sale Here," Washington Post, August 18, 1945, 2. But cautiousness and circumspection abounded, too. Warnings about the risks DDT posed to humans, animals, and nature appeared repeatedly and prominently in the national and local press. Although historian James Whorton, among others, has argued that early warnings about DDT were "generally dismissed as hysteria," when the historical record broadens beyond expert and institutional sources, it does not uniformly support this view.⁹⁷Whorton, Before Silent Spring, 250. A notable fraction of reporters, county agents, and farmers took early warnings seriously. And the letters of Claxton residents indicate that warnings were within easy reach of the self-described "housewife" of a blacksmith, the "housewife" of a small farmer, and their neighbors in a locale with direct exposure to DDT.

The Claxton letters may turn out to be unique. They may also turn out to be the tip of an unexplored archive. Colson, Plyler, and their neighbors did not (as far as I have found) publish letters to the editor in local or national papers. The extant record of their correspondence with state and federal health and agricultural officials and politicians is also fragmentary. But its existence indicates that the experience of individuals who encountered DDT may shift historical thinking about the chemical's storied dramatic change of fortune between the mid 1940s and the late 1960s. It also indicates that it's worth looking for and at more obscure sources yet to find the voices of spray operators, farm hands, migrant agricultural workers, merchants, and small farmers like the Colson and Plyler families, who may have received DDT, and its class of postwar chemicals, with as much ambivalence and precaution as many privileged experts did, if not more. Lastly, this record supports—and sheds light on—otherwise offhand references to popular resistance to DDT spraying operations in government and other expert sources. MCWA records of the Extended Program of malaria eradication, for instance, mention "occasional refusals to having houses sprayed" in South Carolina and Arkansas.⁹⁸See for example Malaria Control in War Areas, Federal Security Agency, US Public Health Service. They say nothing of refusals in North Carolina, even though that state's health journal reported that some householders were "dubious" of DDT spray teams and that ten percent of homes turned away the teams on their first visit.⁹⁹Jens A. Jensen, "The DDT Residual Spraying Program for Malaria Control in North Carolina," The Health Bulletin 60, no. 10 (1945): 12–14. Opposition to DDT existed from the start, but its extent, contours, and meanings as yet remain unexamined.

In part, this open question remains because much of the historiography of DDT assumes what experts in the 1940s (and some historians of later decades) assumed: that early objections to DDT represented "hysteria," a word itself suggesting dismissal of DDT objections because of the identity of the individuals voicing them. Colson and Plyler were accused of being "overanxious," and the DDT problems they perceived "all in their minds," even as male newspaper columnists, county agents, beekeeper association heads, and scientific authors who raised identical concerns were not similarly accused. Of course, Colson and Plyler's DDT critique went further than theirs. Many of DDT's critics worried that the insecticide could adversely affect health and nature; Colson and Plyler expressed certainty that it did. They also tied the chemical's use, and the laws and regulations supporting its use, to larger problems they perceived in the postwar political and economic order. For this, they faced gendered character attacks. Their experience presaged the orchestrated opposition that Rachel Carson encountered after the publication of Silent Spring, and that other female activists striving to draw a connection between environmental contaminants and human ill health faced in the decades that followed.¹⁰⁰Linda J. Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, 1st ed. (New York: H. Holt, 1997), 430; Elizabeth D. Blum, Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 54–55.

Colson and Plyler were literate, educated, and empowered enough to voice their objections to DDT and all that it symbolized to them. They were also white. Well before DDT drifted over their homes, however, it was sprayed inside the homes of black families in rural Georgia and Arkansas' cotton country and in a village of sugarcane laborers in Puerto Rico. The spraying was part of a set of federal experiments (for which little record seems to exist) upon which broader use of DDT in the war and afterward was based. An article on the Arkansas experiments describes the "field site" as a place where "ninety-five percent of the houses are of tenant or sharecropper type, shotgun-construction, newspaper lined, and inhabited by Negroes making only a marginal living."¹⁰¹"DDT May Control Malaria," Science News Letter, December 30, 1944, 418. A report on the Georgia experiments notes that DDT left "negligible" markings on the walls, in homes that were so "crowded" with furniture and belongings it was difficult to spray.¹⁰²Letter from S.W. Simmons to Porter A. Stephens, DDT Reports, Vol. 1, July 4, 1944, Folder: DDT Reports Vol. 1 & 2, Historical Files, Box 3, Record Group 442, National Archives at Atlanta. The decision to test the spray in their homes was undoubtedly supported by the observation that in the South, blacks had a higher prevalence of malaria than whites—not that justifications were needed in a time when blacks were routinely experimented on without consent. This differential value of lives troubled Plyler about the use of DDT after the war, when landowners subjected poor and black hands to the spray but wouldn't "risk a mule" in it. And this differential makes it all the more important to seek new sources on the nation's response to DDT during and after the war.

The second time North Carolina's spray teams passed through the communities targeted by the MCWA's Extended Program, just one percent of homes turned them away. Margaret Humphreys, in her study of malaria in the South, takes this as evidence of overwhelming popular acceptance of DDT, and as an indication that DDT's effectiveness put a shine on its reputation and paved the pesticide's way.¹⁰³Humphreys, Malaria, 148. Passing references to resistance in the historical record often get read this way, as nothing more than proof that the American public happily doused itself in DDT in exchange for a pest-free existence. But lay resistance to DDT, even if official sources suggest it affected "just" one percent of the population, is worth further examination for two reasons. First, resistance may not have been as minor as recorded. Even if DDT doubters comprised a minority of Americans, such small numbers may belie important differentials along lines of race, income-level, gender, or occupation. Experiences of illness through chemical exposure eroded Colson's and Plyler's acceptance of DDT, but so did their feelings of frustration over what they perceived as a new relationship between citizen wealth and power and the government's failure to check imbalances in that power in the postwar years. Small numbers also say little to nothing about how acceptance took root across lines of race, class, and other factors, and whether it was secured not solely through jingoism and faith in technology, but through historically determined traditions of subservience to institutions of power. DDT's acceptance, of course, was built not just on its performance in war, but on the basis of the preliminary tests in "negro shacks" and plantation workers' homes.¹⁰⁴Malaria Control in War Areas, Federal Security Agency, US Public Health Service; Letter from S.W. Simmons to Porter A. Stephens, DDT Reports, Vol. 1, July 4, 1944, Folder: DDT Reports, Vol. 1 & 2, Historical Files, Box 3, Record Group 442, National Archives at Atlanta.

Second, even if the opinions expressed in the Claxton letters (and embedded in the actions of people who turned DDT-wielding health officers away from their homes) represented a minority view, they retain value yet. For they offer insight into a transformative moment in American society, government, medicine, and public health—and insight into how that transformation was experienced in at least one corner of the South.¹⁰⁵Historian Michael Willrich makes a similar argument about Progressive Era anti-vaccinationists in Michael Willrich, Pox: An American History (New York: Penguin Press, 2011). The Claxton residents' letters reveal a group of citizens disaffected by new patterns of wealth, the behavior of industry, and the growing distance of government, and frustrated by science's promises combined with lack of answers. Their push-back against technological developments, frustration with public health experts, and demand that government exercise greater authority to protect its citizens supports the argument that DDT debates of the 1940s presaged debates and events of the 1960s.¹⁰⁶Russell makes the argument that expert debates about DDT did just this. See Chapter 8 in War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring. Such sentiments formed a bridge between older forms of social activism and organized movements that led to the banning of DDT in the US later in the twentieth century.

Acknowledgments

Emory University's University Research Committee, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Emory University History Department supported the research and writing of this essay. The author thanks Carrie Crawford, Terrence Greer, Abigail Li Holst, Hays Hopkins, and Abigail Meert for invaluable research assistance and the anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions.

About the Author

Elena Conis is a faculty member in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and author of Vaccine Nation: America's Changing Relationship with Immunization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). She is currently working on a book about the history of DDT.

Public Health Crossings

Nearly a year before Finlay's mosquito theory was finally confirmed in Cuba, a US physician discovered in Puerto Rico the source of the pervasive anemia that had afflicted the population for more than a century. On August 10, 1899, Bailey K. Ashford, then a young post surgeon of the US Army, revealed that hookworm caused the mysterious weakness and extreme pallor that he had observed in peasants for nearly a year.¹The broad term "peasant" includes the diverse farmers and laborers of Puerto Rico's mountainous coffee region. This operational definition is not meant to override social and property distinctions within the region. See Sidney Mintz, "A Note on the Definition of Peasantries," Journal of Peasant Studies 1 (1973): 91–106. See also Frederick Cooper, Allen F. Isaacman, Florencia E. Mallon, William Roseberry, and Steve J. Stern, Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). Ashford was not the first fascinated by the mysterious affliction; for decades physicians and intellectuals in Puerto Rico had made it the central concern of essays and novels. Unlike yellow fever in Cuba, hookworm was not characterized by dramatic seasonal outbreaks in port cities. Instead, it was a sluggish disease endemic in the island's mountainous interior. Whereas in Cuba most yellow fever victims were nonimmune Spanish immigrants, in Puerto Rico most hookworm victims were peasants—commonly known as jíbaros—whose families had harbored the disease for generations. Moreover, whereas the control of yellow fever required killing the mosquito vector and eliminating its breeding places, the control of hookworm disease required direct medication of patients.

Like many young physicians of the era, Ashford was intensely curious about tropical diseases—a fixation that led him to link anemia to hookworm after he examined the stool sample of a jíbaro in the microscope.²Bailey K. Ashford, A Soldier in Science: The Autobiography of Bailey K. Ashford (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1998 [1934]), 3. Aware of the historical consequences of his discovery, he rushed his patient to the "local photographer to immortalize him," turning the Puerto Rican jíbaro into the "prototype of anemic millions all over the Caribbean, all over the tropical belt that girdles the portly belly of Mother Earth."³Ibid., 5.

If Ashford's photographic record connected the jíbaro to hookworm sufferers around the world, at a local level public and financial support for initiating an anti-hookworm campaign was far from secure. After several years of frustration seeking support, Ashford finally found a sponsor in Governor William H. Hunt, one of the leading figures in organizing the new civil government of Puerto Rico. In 1904, his administration allocated funds to establish the Puerto Rico Anemia Commission, launching the first large-scale campaign to study and treat hookworm disease in the hemisphere.⁴William H. Hunt, Message of the Honorable William H. Hunt to the Second Legislative Assembly (San Juan: Bureau of Printing and Supplies, 1904), 20–21. With its emphasis on testing for hookworm, preventing soil pollution, and offering pharmaceutical control, the commission rendered visible the vast population suffering from hookworm disease. As the campaign gained popularity, anemia ceased to be a disease in its own right; instead, it became a symptom of what doctors referred to as hookworm disease, or uncinariasis. As the architect of the campaign, Ashford recruited prominent Puerto Rican doctors, including Pedro Gutiérrez Igaravídez, Francisco Sein, Agustín Stahl, and Francisco del Valle Atiles, to collaborate with the commission. Through their efforts thousands of peasants were introduced into the realm of medicine and institutional health care.

Despite the crucial significance of Puerto Rico in the development of US public health, the place that this campaign occupies in the history of US tropical medicine and international philanthropy has been underappreciated.⁵One notable exception is Nicole Trujillo-Pagán, Modern Colonization by Medical Intervention: US Medicine in Puerto Rico (Boston, MA: Brill, 2013). For hookworm disease in Puerto Rico, see Francisco A. Scarano, "Desear el jíbaro: Metáforas de la identidad puertorriqueña en la transición imperial," Illes i imperis 2 (1999): 65–74; José Quiroga, "Narrating the Tropical Pharmacy," in Puerto Rican Jam: Essays on Culture and Politics, edited by Frances Negrón-Muntaner and Ramón Grosfoguel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 116–26; and Fernando Feliú, "Rendering the Invisible Visible and the Visible Invisible: The Colonizing Function of Bailey K. Ashford's Antianemia Campaigns," in Foucault and Latin America: Appropriations and Deployment of Discursive Analysis, edited by Benigno Trigo (New York: Routledge, 2002), 153–68. Despite its contribution, this literature focuses mostly on imperial discourses and practices, not on the popular responses to the hookworm campaign or its transnational implications. In many ways, Ashford's accomplishments have been overshadowed by the yellow fever work of Carlos Finlay, Walter Reed, and William C. Gorgas in Cuba. Moreover, relative to the historical understanding of hookworm campaigns in the US South, Costa Rica, Brazil, the Philippines, and Mexico, the campaign in Puerto Rico has earned little more than a footnote in standard accounts of US public health history.⁶On hookworm eradication in the US South, see John Ettling, The Germ of Laziness: Rockefeller Philanthropy and Public Health in the New South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); and Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 96–132. On Costa Rica, see Steven Palmer, From Popular Medicine to Medical Populism: Doctors, Healers, and Public Power in Costa Rica, 1800–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 155–82. On Brazil, see Gilberto Hochman, A era do saneamento: As bases da política de saúde pública no Brasil (São Paulo: Editora Hucitec, 1998). On Mexico, see Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Marriage of Convenience: Rockefeller International Health and Revolutionary Mexico (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 61–116. On the Philippines, see Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 104–29. Yet this campaign, like no other, was the first that raised public awareness about the disease and served as a model for hookworm eradication campaigns worldwide. To date, too few have paid close attention to the haphazard process that helped build this campaign, the people who sought treatment, and the role of Puerto Rico in launching Rockefeller philanthropic public health initiatives. Integrated into one history, these public health crossings illuminate overlapping stories of colonial agency and imperial rule, of peasants and physicians coming to understand hookworm disease in view of each other, and of the transformation of the Puerto Rico campaign as a model for stemming the disease in the rest of the tropical world.

That the story of Ashford and Puerto Rico's hookworm campaign remains mostly hidden is hardly surprising considering the place they occupy in the history of imperial medicine. Four factors in particular explain this lack of attention. First, the battle between Ashford, the physician, and Charles W. Stiles, the zoologist, to identify and name the intestinal parasite that causes the disease was won by Stiles. Working with a hookworm specimen provided by Ashford, in 1902 Stiles found that the parasite belonged to a new species, Uncinaria americana, although later he changed the name to the more sensational Necator americanus (American Killer).⁷For the nomenclature dispute between Ashford and Stiles, see Ettling, Germ of Laziness, 29–33. Second, Ashford's life does not fit the traditional historiography of empire since he was not the conventional emissary of the white man's burden or US imperialism.⁸José Rigau, "Bailey K. Ashford, más allá de sus memorias," Puerto Rico Health Sciences Journal 19, no. 1 (2000): 51–55. On the contrary, in 1899, the same year he "discovered" the cause of anemia, he married María Asunción López, daughter of the island's first newspaper publisher, and from then on devoted himself to curing the afflicted. He spoke and wrote fluently in Spanish, and, despite the paternalistic tone of his words, he frequently and genuinely praised the work, wits, and moral compass of the peasants he treated. He raised his children in Puerto Rico, and remained on the island off and on until his death in 1934. Third, while Puerto Rico was indeed a colonial laboratory, in the early decades of the twentieth century the island was represented as a docile counterexample to Cuba and the Philippines, and today it remains politically linked to the United States; these facts have tended to make historians of imperial medicine less interested in the campaign. Finally, shortly after the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission took up Ashford's ideas for eradicating hookworm, a new rhetoric of public health efficiency and rigor declared the Puerto Rican model expensive and unreliable. Hence, to rediscover the significance of the campaign initiated in the colonial periphery, it is first necessary to restore the influence that the Puerto Rican campaign once enjoyed.

Paying close attention to the development of the Puerto Rican campaign in the context of expanding US imperial medicine highlights its significance beyond its local success. The campaign came into existence through the interactions of new colonial administrators, US and Puerto Rican health specialists, and the inhabitants of the mountainous coffee region. As Paul A. Kramer has pointed out, "colonial dynamics are not strictly derivative of, dependent on, or respondent to metropolitan forces," but are instead part of a dense network of forces that continuously remake each other.⁹Paul A. Kramer, "Race, Empire, and Transnational History," in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 199–209. While many Puerto Rican elites participated actively in building the infrastructure envisioned by the commission, others oriented their efforts toward civic organizations disseminating hookworm information or toward opposing the campaign based on their political alliances. In addition, popular participation often pushed municipal and colonial officials to establish treatment stations, rather than simply to respond to the US disciplinary strategies. Peasants, for example, appropriated specific elements of colonial rule that most directly benefited their health interests, and rejected those that did not. Across the Atlantic, US physicians followed closely events unfolding in Puerto Rico to assess the political and medical impact of this health intervention among the white rural poor. In this field of exchanges and possibilities where new ideas about the disease and its cure emerged, the boundaries between colonial possession and the imperial state blurred, and new medicalized stereotypes about populations were forged, transformed, and contested.

This chapter interprets the back-and-forth flow of new medical knowledge from US military doctors through local physicians to hookworm patients and from Puerto Rico to the United States as evidence of two significant public health crossings. The first crossing illustrates the extent that physicians and patients shaped, and were shaped, by the hookworm campaign. This campaign is remarkable because its complete novelty to the medical community and the mountainous dweller led to creative interactions that shaped the flow of information and popular expectations.¹⁰For the interplay of elite and popular responses to the United States, see Eileen J. Suárez Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870–1920 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 110–34. The second crossing demonstrates the linkages between colonial medicine and US public health philanthropy. Years of exchanges between colonial officials, physicians, and journalists made Puerto Rico a constant point of reference among the US physicians and the public at large. When in 1909 the Rockefeller Foundation decided to undertake the hookworm program in the US South, the image of tens of thousands of redeemed Puerto Ricans was not too far from the minds of its staff. Their focus would be to adapt the lessons of the colonial laboratory to the United States.

Hookworm in the Coffee Region

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the increased cultivation of coffee in Puerto Rico's central mountain range generated favorable conditions for hookworm infestation. By the 1870s, the coffee grown in the highlands had become the island's principal agricultural export, surpassing the sugar produced in the coastal zones. In the next two decades, coffee production nearly tripled, accounting for more than 75 percent of the value of Puerto Rico's gross export. The expansion of large coffee estates in the highlands and the attendant impoverishment of small landholders resulted in an increased number of landless families. Peasants in turn were forced to become renters or agregados (service tenants), joining the growing number of wage laborers on coffee plantations. Fueled by the coffee boom, highland migration soared and for the first time the central mountainous region displaced the coast as the most densely populated area of Puerto Rico.¹¹For the coffee boom in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, see Laird W. Bergad, Coffee and the Growth of Agrarian Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), especially chapter 4. By the time the United States invaded Puerto Rico in 1898, 63 percent of its 953,243 inhabitants were peasants living in the coffee region.¹²Irene Fernández Aponte, El cambio de soberanía en Puerto Rico: El otro '98 (Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992).

The generalized misery of landless peasants and the cyclical nature of work in coffee plantations favored hookworm infestation. Coffee picking generally began during the rainy season, the period between the months of June and November. Migrant laborers frequently harvested coffee under pouring rain, moving from plantation to plantation looking for work as the bean matured in different localities. The hookworm larvae, like the coffee variety grown in the region (Coffea arabica), thrived on rain, humidity, and protection from direct sun. It was under the shade of trees such as guamá, moca, capá prieto, and the búcare that the laboring men, women, and children picked the matured bean, and their bare feet would come into contact with soil polluted by feces, which harbored hookworm larvae. The larvae then entered between the soft skin of the toes, passed through the bloodstream to the lungs, and traveled from there to the throat, stomach, and finally to the intestines, where it colonized the intestinal lining. As the day passed, the worker would experience an itching sensation between his or her toes, and by the next day, an unbearable dermatitis—commonly known as mazamorra—would develop. Once in the intestinal lining, the hookworm could live for up to ten years. The female parasite in the intestines reproduced rapidly, releasing thousands of eggs through the feces to hatch in the moist soil and reinitiating the infection cycle. The simple harboring of the worms, however, did not immediately provoke symptoms. Symptoms were directly proportional to the intensity of the infection. In normal adults, a moderate infection might cause pallor, nausea, and anemia, whereas a severe infection entailed a series of digestive and nervous disorders that could lead to death. In children, moderate to severe infections could impair mental and physical development.¹³James J. Plorde, "Hookworms," in Sherris Medical Microbiology: An Introduction to Infectious Diseases, edited by Kenneth J. Ryan and C. George Ray (Norwalk, CT: Appleton and Lange, 2010), 844–46.

Years of seasonal labor and shifting patterns of migration resulted in a hookworm epidemic that mostly afflicted the population of the coffee region. The intensity and scope of hookworm infestation depended on the contingent forces of poverty and environmental vulnerability. The virtual absence of public health infrastructure and the lack of outhouses on coffee plantations contributed to the situation. "Uncinariasis has its great breeding place in the coffee plantations of Porto Rico," the two leading doctors of the eradication campaign reported, "and here a barefooted people pollute the soil and are infected and reinfected by it until the life of every man, woman, and child is punctuated by a vast number of reinfections."¹⁴Bailey K. Ashford and Pedro Gutiérrez Igaravídez, Uncinariasis in Porto Rico: A Medical and Economic Problem (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911), 11. Ashford's diagnosis in 1899 laid the groundwork for a new colonial pact that increasingly made the state responsible for the protection and well-being of the population in the coffee region. Public health advocates invoked the figure of the jíbaro to move beyond the relief work of private charity to develop a centralized public health infrastructure.¹⁵On nineteenth-century charity work, see Teresita Martínez Verge, Shaping the Discourse on Space: Charity and Its Wards in Nineteenth-Century San Juan, Puerto Rico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).

This centralizing goal built on an ideology of excess and discipline that connected the anemic peasant to other social maladies. As noted in Chapter 1, in the second half of the nineteenth century, narratives of caution linked the disease's symptom to an endless number of excesses—from alcohol abuse to a lack of work ethic to sexual promiscuity—that enervated the human body and paved the way for the feebleness so common among the inhabitants of the highlands. Doctors, writers, and journalists popularized the idea that the widespread feebleness of peasants was not only the result of inadequate nutrition, poor housing, and lack of hygiene, but also of racial mixing and the tropical environment. Francisco del Valle Atiles, for example, wrote a lurid sociological tract about the reprehensible lives of peasants, warning about the possibility of social dissolution. In El campesino puertorriqueño (The Puerto Rican Peasant; 1887), he complained that Puerto Rico's path toward progress was hindered by the "lack of vitality" of the jíbaro and an overabundance of "incapable arms" in agricultural enterprises.¹⁶Francisco del Valle Atiles, El campesino puertorriqueño: Sus condiciones físicas, intelectuales y morales, causas que determinan y medios para mejoralas (San Juan: Tipografía de González Font, 1887), 8. The mobilization of these narratives served in part to forge consensus about the need to transform the peasant population into a citizenry capable of hygienic regulation and regimented work before it could be included as part of a broad political base.¹⁷See Astrid Cubano-Iguina, "Political Culture and Male Mass-Party Formation in Late-Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico," Hispanic American Historical Review 78, no. 4 (1998): 631–62.

After the discovery of hookworm in Puerto Rico, physicians and their patients began to transform the understanding of peasant malaise. While the ways peasants described their symptoms were not radically different from those of the preceding generation, their understanding of the disease and their efforts to combat it dramatically changed. For one, under US rule, anemics seeking treatment became hookworm patients. If Ashford and the many doctors who joined his crusade were central in introducing these new ideas, so too were the people who ventured for the first time into dispensaries. Campaign officials used reports, pamphlets, posters, brochures, newspapers, and photographs to disseminate medical information, but peasants too spread the word about medical professionals, treatment protocols, and their own pursuit of health. In other words, the new colonial context mediated the emergence of distinct forms of what medical anthropologist João Biehl calls "biomedical citizenship" among peasants mobilizing to demand treatment.¹⁸João Biehl, "The Activist State: Global Pharmaceuticals, AIDS, and Citizenship in Brazil," Social Text 22, no. 3 (2004): 105–32. Despite the island's high rate of illiteracy and low rate of schooling, peasants flocked to hookworm stations and municipal offices, requesting access to physicians and medicines. For instance, by 1910 Ashford and Gutiérrez Igaravídez estimated that over 272,000 people had received treatment through the Anemia Commission, and another 30,000 through private physicians. This explosion in popular participation and mobilization of popular expectations in the pursuit of health is one of the most enduring—albeit less recognized—consequences of the campaign. Peasants were more than colonized subjects; they were actors who defined part of the terms under which the campaign developed.

The origins of this campaign began not in an unpolluted scientific laboratory but amid the devastation left by a terrible hurricane that transformed all aspects of life in the coffee region, and set in motion waves of migrants who sought relief by moving to coastal towns. Some of them would become the first hookworm patients. In time, the development of the campaign in Puerto Rico would provide inspiration for the initial hookworm efforts of the Rockefeller Foundation, a private philanthropic organization founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1913, in the US South and Brazil. But we begin with a poetic rendition of the hopelessness felt after the hurricane.

The Whirlwinds of Health

The verses of the canción "La invasión Yanqui" reveal the deep sense of despair felt by people living in the coffee region after Hurricane San Ciriaco hit the island in August 1899. In a few hours, the coffee crop was swept away and the farms that produced it were reduced to half their value. In the town of Jayuya, whole coffee plantations slipped down the mountains into the river. Over 2,700 deaths were registered and 500 more people disappeared.¹⁹On the impact of San Ciriaco, see Stuart Schwartz, "The Hurricane of San Ciriaco: Disaster, Politics, and Society in Puerto Rico, 1899–1901," Hispanic American Historical Review 72, no. 3 (1992): 303–45. Capturing this devastation, the canción conveys the generalized scarcity and destitution the poor suffered:

El café se va a perder (The coffee will spoil)

no queriendo el extranjero; (if the foreigners don't want it;)

entonces, ¿con qué dinero (so with what money)

nos vamos a sostener? (will we support ourselves?)

Después de esta invasión (After this invasion)

vendrán los días peores; (the worst days will come;)

tendremos que ir desfilando. (we'll have to run off.)²⁰Anonymous, "La invasión Yanqui," in La poesía popular en Puerto Rico, edited by María Cadilla (San Juan: Sociedad Histórica de Puerto Rico, 1999), 322.

After critiquing the unwillingness of the United States to provide a secure foreign market for coffee, the narrator asks, "¿A dónde diablos los pobres / tendremos que dir rodando?" (Where the hell will we poor folk go?) In asking this question, the poetic voice—or rather, the voices in the communal register of this composition—portrays the US military intervention as an added catastrophe for the very poor.²¹On the importance of 1898 in Puerto Rico, see Francisco A. Scarano, "Liberal Pacts and Hierarchies of Rule: Approaching the Imperial Transition in Cuba and Puerto Rico," Hispanic American Historical Review 78, no. 4 (1998): 583–602; Silvia Álvarez Curbelo, Mary Frances Gallart, and Carmen Raffucci, eds., Los arcos de la memoria: El '98 de los pueblos puertorriqueños (San Juan: Postdata, 1998); Fernando Picó, 1898: La guerra después de la guerra (Río Piedras, PR: Ediciones Huracán, 1987); and Lillian Guerra, Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico: The Struggle for Self, Community, and Nation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998).

But hidden in the canción's political commentary was the migration of destitute coffee dwellers from the highlands to the coast to look for aid. Among them, a lucky few found food and shelter in the town of Ponce, where the surgeon general placed Ashford in charge of a large field hospital to care for the "sick poor drifting down."²²Bailey K. Ashford, "Report to the Surgeon General," December 22, 1899, Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine, RG 2.3, box 10. Abundant food, however, failed to reduce the high incidence of anemia. Local physicians suggested that these migrants were suffering from malaria, diarrhea, or an obscure fever, but their histories and symptoms did not match those claims. After reviewing a copy of Patrick Manson's Tropical Diseases, Ashford examined the feces of the patients with a microscope, found eggs, and established that an intestinal worm was the cause of the disease.²³British physician Patrick Manson (1844–1922) published the first manual of tropical diseases in 1898. While he recognized that the term "tropical disease" defined ailments linked but not exclusively confined to the tropical latitudes, he inaugurated a new medical specialty that associated the tropics with specific diseases. See David Arnold, "'Illusory Riches': Representations of the Tropical World, 1840–1950," Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 21, no. 1 (2000): 6–18. Following Manson's guidelines, he gave them a thymol-derived vermifuge to expel the worms from their bodies. Ashford reported to the US surgeon general that while it was "not probable that those degraded to the level of people whose life is bounded by the tropical plantation, enjoying little beyond cutting cane and picking coffee, [could] have a high standard of personal cleanliness," hookworm was caused by direct contact with soil polluted with human feces "while at work." Ashford, unlike many physicians of the time, not only believed that anemia was caused by hookworm, but recognized that the poor working conditions in plantations sustained the life cycle of the intestinal parasite.

The medication of poor patients was quite rare in turn-of-the-century Puerto Rico. Throughout the nineteenth century, health care was limited to private charities, institutionalized philanthropy, and individual municipalities, and the extent of medical assistance was largely arbitrary. In a 1900 letter to the US civilian governor, Dr. Fawcett Smith, the director of the Superior Board of Health of Puerto Rico, complained that the "sanitary condition" of the island was "primitive, disgraceful, and dangerous to the public." To compound matters, municipal physicians were political appointees who, besides being "scandalously maltreated" and "absurdly" remunerated, were always at risk of losing the favor of the town mayor. The new bureaucracy established by the colonial state did not help, either. According to Smith, the fact that the Superior Board of Health occupied a "subordinate position as a Bureau of the Department of Interior" of the United States led to a "radically defective" administration.²⁴Fawcett Smith to Charles Allen, November 26, 1900, Fondo Fortaleza, Archivo General de Puerto Rico, box 74. Smith's conclusions were as dismal as the failed attempts of US authorities to improve the health of Puerto Ricans. In the following years, despite the imposition of new sanitary measures by the colonial government, diseases continue to increase the mortality rate. After five years of US rule, the average death rate per thousand had increased from 28.9 percent in 1898 to 33.48 percent in 1903.²⁵Bailey K. Ashford and Pedro Gutiérrez Igaravídez, Summary of a Ten Years' Campaign against Hookworm Disease in Porto Rico (Chicago: American Medical Association, 1910), 3.

This dire statistic not only challenged the alleged benevolence of US rule on the island, but also became a source of public embarrassment for supporters of imperialism in the United States. A successful hookworm campaign in Puerto Rico could counter the image of a failing imperial project back in the mainland. Despite the desire of US imperialists to turn the image of Puerto Rico around as soon as possible, attempts to establish the hookworm campaign throughout the island developed gradually and unevenly. In broad terms, the Puerto Rican campaign took place in three distinct phases: an extensive survey in 1903; two subsequent campaigns carried out by the Puerto Rico Anemia Commission in 1904 and 1905; and campaigns under the direction of the Anemia Dispensary Service of the Department of Health, Charities, and Corrections from 1906 to 1909. As institutional structures for hookworm control developed throughout the highlands, the interest in redeeming the jíbaro was both renewed and redefined.

Convinced that more information was needed to garner the support of the colonial government and medical profession, Ashford and Dr. Walter W. King of the Marine Hospital Service conducted a survey of one hundred cases in Ponce in 1903. While nearly every patient had to overcome the fear of their first medical examination, most of them felt relief after the first treatment. A combination of a thymol-derived vermifuge and salts purged the intestinal worms from patients, relieving patients from anemic exhaustion—the most common symptom of the disease—in about twenty-four to 48 hours. The benefits of taking the medicine must have freed them from their initial apprehension, making the risk associated with the novel treatment worthwhile and easy to promote. In September 1903, Ashford and King published their results in American Medicine. They noted that 30 percent of the deaths charged to "anemia" were caused by hookworm and estimated that the disease affected approximately 90 percent of the rural population.²⁶Bailey K. Ashford and Walter W. King, "A Study of Uncinariasis in Porto Rico," American Medicine 6 (1903): 391–92. In the following issue, the journal editors endorsed a massive eradication campaign on the island. A month later, Governor Hunt promised Ashford that he would take measures to "stop the inroads of this terrible disease." To combat the general skepticism expressed by local physicians, Hunt urged Ashford to publish the principal findings in "the Spanish language" to promote their "circulation over the island" before requesting the doctors' support.²⁷William H. Hunt to Bailey K. Ashford, October 9, 1903, Colección Ashford (hereafter CA), Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Ciencias Médicas, book 1. This approach required the translation and recognition of colonial knowledge about hookworm to win over Puerto Rican physicians.

Anxious to gain momentum for the campaign, Ashford also initiated lobbying efforts abroad to rally the support of Puerto Rican physicians. In December 1903, he made public a letter from Colonel William C. Gorgas, now the US chief surgeon of the Department of the East, which endorsed the "vital necessity of combating [hookworm] disease" on the island.²⁸William C. Gorgas to Bailey K. Ashford, December 3, 1903, CA, box 6; Gorgas to Ashford, January 22, 1904, CA, box 6; Ashford to Gorgas, January 28, 1908, CA, box 6. Ashford's work in promoting outside support, especially the validation from the person responsible for the yellow fever eradication in Cuba, proved effective. Later that month, Ashford delivered a speech in Spanish to the members of the Asociación Médica de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico Medical Association). He framed the eradication campaign as a patriotic duty that would benefit the "whole population." Ashford called on the "well-to-do, refined, educated class" to join the campaign and "lead gently in our sanitary reform.²⁹Bailey K. Ashford, "First Announcement of the Causes of Anemia in Porto Rico to the Medical Profession of the Island," CA, box 1, document 5. His presentation must have been persuasive. Following the event, the Puerto Rican Medical Association committed itself to the crusade against hookworm in order to uplift the "enervated and atrophied spirit of our race."³⁰Manuel Quevedo Baez to Bailey K. Ashford, December 16, 1903, CA, box 5. William P. Craighill, a member of the US Corps of Engineers who was present at the event, was "proud" to witness the command and eloquence that Ashford demonstrated while addressing the "enlightened and progressive members of the medical profession."³¹William P. Craighill to General O'Reilly, March 14, 1904, Papers of the Office of the Adjutant General, National Archives and Records Administration, RG 97, box 478, document 65329.

Although the medical community in Puerto Rico began to promote the hookworm campaign, not all Puerto Ricans welcomed Ashford's efforts. Sharp political disputes meant that it took longer than expected to dispel the widespread belief that the anemia was caused by hunger. Conservative politicians aligned with pro-Spanish forces claimed that the narrow focus on the disease would distract attention from the terrible malnutrition and devastated economy created by the United States' arrival.³²On the pauperization of the Puerto Rican population, see Guerra, Popular Expression, 19–45. "We believe that to deal with this malady neither medicines nor physicians are of value," the editors of the Heraldo Español complained. "Anemia in our country does not mean anything other than hunger."³³El heraldo español, June 15, 1904, 1, CA, box 6. Emphasis in the original. See also Bailey K. Ashford, Walter W. King, and Pedro Gutiérrez Igaravídez to Beekman Winthrop, September 23, 1904, CA, box 6. Similar criticism also came from organized labor. Leaders of the Federación Libre de Trabajadores (Free Federation of Workers) claimed that the anemia suffered in Puerto Rico "was occasioned by the lack of sufficient and nourishing food."³⁴See "Puertorican Labor Conditions," CA, box 6, document 175a. During his 1904 visit to Puerto Rico, Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor, blamed greedy employers for the general conditions of poverty, pointing out that the miserable wages did not allow workers to buy enough food.³⁵"Samuel Gompers Aclamado en CA, box 6, documents223a–e.

For several years Puerto Rico's newspapers debated the existence of hookworm disease and its treatment, but the intensity of the debate gradually subsided when the colonial government initiated a concerted effort against hookworm. In January 1904, Governor William Hunt asked the legislature of Puerto Rico to allocate $5,000 to "begin an effective campaign" against hookworm disease.³⁶Hunt, Message, 20–21. Within a month, the Puerto Rico Anemia Commission, composed of Drs. Ashford, King, and Gutiérrez Igaravídez, set up a provisional field hospital in Bayamón, a town where Gutiérrez Igaravídez—the only Puerto Rican member of the commission—had secured the support of Dr. Agustín Stahl, one of the most prominent physicians on the island. Stahl offered his services at no cost and allowed the commission to erect the facilities on the grounds of the municipal hospital. The commission reported an "immediate betterment in the patients" after the expulsion of the parasites, and regarded the follow-up treatments of returning patients as proof of the campaign's value. In two weeks, the commission reported, 1,254 patients had been examined and treated, which relieved many doubts among local doctors. "Many physicians," the commissioners observed, "visit the scene of our work and express their conviction that uncinariasis is an extensive epidemic in Puerto Rico."³⁷Bailey K. Ashford, Walter W. King, and Pedro Gutiérrez Igaravídez to Beekman Winthrop, n.d., CA, box 1, document 132. When the Bayamón field hospital closed on April 1904, the San Juan News reported that Ashford was publicly praised for "valuable services and efforts on behalf of the poor sick from anemia." In a farewell ceremony, Stahl "presented the doctor with a distinction, and in a few well-chosen words told him that the 150 signatures attached thereon represented the whole community."³⁸On May 1, 1904, Agustín Stahl held a public ceremony at the Bayamón hospital to commemorate Ashford. See "Dr. Ashford Is Honored," San Juan News, May 3, 1904, 1. After the commission's departure, Stahl continued treating patients until June 15, when the existing medicines ran out.

The dispensary camp proceeded to Utuado, a coffee town still suffering from the devastation left by San Ciriaco. After a couple days of delay, the provisional hospital located on high grounds across the Viví River was opened to the public on May 9. The commission believed that with a population of forty thousand, the remote town provided a sufficiently confined environment to study the disease and its treatment. Immediately after the first cases of anemia were treated, a ripple effect drew thousands of men, women, and children to the field dispensary. "Beginning with 10 to 20, by the latter part of July, we were receiving from 125 to 150 new patients daily," Ashford and Gutiérrez Igaravídez reported. "The rate continued to increase, and these, with the old patients returning, made our clinic from 300 to 600 per day."³⁹Ashford and Gutiérrez Igaravídez, Uncinariasis in Porto Rico, 106. As word about the free medical treatment spread, many hookworm patients traveled—some by foot, the severely ill in hammocks—from remote areas to the dispensary.⁴⁰Bailey K. Ashford, Walter W. King, and Pedro Gutiérrez Igaravídez, Report of the Commission for the Study and Treatment of "Anemia" in Porto Rico (San Juan: Bureau of Printing and Supplies, 1904), 14–15. Those too ill to return to their houses were admitted to the tent hospital.

Profiting from the experience in Bayamón, patient treatment at Utuado became systematized. Patients arrived early in the morning, some of them after walking for several days on the road, to be examined before noon. After filling out a medical form, they submitted fecal samples for microscopic examination. Once their clinical history was recorded, each patient received a brief lecture on hookworm and an identification card with their case number.⁴¹"Comisión de la Anemia de Puerto Rico: Manera de tomar las medicinas," CA, box 5; Bailey K. Ashford, Walter W. King, and Pedro Gutiérrez Igaravídez, Preliminary Report of the Commission for the Suppression of Anemia in Porto Rico (San Juan: Bureau of Printing and Supplies, 1906), 8. They also learned about the use and construction of latrines to prevent the spread of the disease. With much of the money spent, on June 15 the commission ceased to accept new patients, and on August 15 ended the treatment of all patients. In a little over four months, 4,482 patients had been treated in Utuado and its laboratory staff had examined a deluge of over 17,564 fecal specimens.⁴²Ashford, King, and Gutiérrez Igaravídez, Report of the Commission, 93. As they had in Bayamón, the commissioners left a stockpile of medicines with the town doctor before leaving.

Their efforts, however, did not go unnoticed by local residents, the media, or high-ranking officials. The Utuado dispensary was visited by the director of health, charities, and correction; the supervisor of health; Puerto Rican congressional delegates; and Governor Hunt. The pages of La democracia noted that the commission had left a "general current of affection and gratitude" among the people of Utuado. Upon the commission's departure, "a crowd assembled around the kind guests to give them their last goodbye." Within hours, the "spontaneous" farewell had turned into an enthusiastic caravan parading down the town streets. A procession of cars led by various town notables "accompanied [the Anemia Commission] some kilometers outside the town."⁴³"Los verdaderos americanos en Puerto Rico," La democracia, August 31, 1904, 1. Ashford, King, and Gutiérrez Igaravídez later reported that the "former scepticism as to the curability of the disease by medicine" had given way to belief.⁴⁴Ashford, King, and Gutiérrez Igaravídez, Report of the Commission, 14–15.

The Dispensary Frenzy

In 1905, the commission had an opportunity to develop a more extensive eradication program based on their success in Bayamón and Utuado. Officials quickly learned that the "cured jíbaro" was the "most potent weapon" for convincing skeptics and promoting the campaign.⁴⁵Bailey K. Ashford to Agustín Stahl, April 18, 1905, CA, box 5. The commission requested continued funding from Governor Beekman Winthrop for this "methodic and scientific organization." It also encouraged the cooperation of "municipalities and their charitable institutions" in transforming a tentative initiative into a centrally coordinated campaign.⁴⁶Ashford, King, and Gutiérrez Igaravídez, Report of the Commission, 100–101. Governor Winthrop agreed, and the legislature appropriated $15,000 to expand the commission's work. Relative to the magnitude of the enterprise, the sum was quite modest, but it helped transform the experimental and localized initiative into an island-wide campaign focused on the coffee region.⁴⁷Ashford, King, and Gutiérrez Igaravídez, Preliminary Report, 6.

After several months of repairs and renovations, the commission's headquarters opened on the crest of a hill near the central plaza of Aibonito, a coffee-growing town close to a major thoroughfare. This location facilitated communication with other municipal "substations" opening around the region. Ashford and Gutiérrez Igaravídez served as coordinators in Aibonito, training doctors, evaluating petitions, and corresponding with colonial officials.⁴⁸Ibid., 8–9. They wrote to plantation owners, encouraging them to construct latrines, instruct their workers about soil pollution, and send hookworm-afflicted individuals to the treatment station. Their pleas, however, did not have the expected results. Plantation owners were rarely willing to incur the added expense of building latrines and, during the picking season, most of them refused to allow workers to visit a treatment station or to walk away from the fields to relieve themselves.⁴⁹Agustín Stahl, "La uncinariasis y La Liga," Boletín de la Asociación Médica de Puerto Rico 3, no. 4 (1905): 7.

In spite of increased financial resources and hopes of centralization, the commission did not follow a standard procedure as it decided where to extend the campaign. Since the commission responded to individual requests from municipal governments, the establishment of additional dispensaries varied greatly, depending on a town's location, the initiative of its officials, and available resources at the time of the request. The process frequently began with a letter from a town's mayor or municipal doctor to either Ashford or the governor of Puerto Rico. Each town negotiated the extent of the fiscal and administrative responsibilities it would assume, which sometimes determined the outcome of their request. A keen awareness of public health developments in other nations also shaped how some of the petitions were framed. Dr. Martin O. de la Rosa, a physician from the town of Comerio, insisted that "the government of the island, in keeping with the practices of other nations, [was] obligated to finance" a hookworm station in his town.⁵⁰"Informe del Dr. Martín O. de la Rosa a los Doctores Ashford, King y Gutiérrez, miembros de la 'Puerto Rico Anemia Commission,'" CA, box 4.

As word about the new dispensaries spread from one town to another, the pressure on municipal officials intensified. Municipal doctors did what they could to provide treatment, and hookworm sufferers to demand it, even before many of the petitions for local population stations were submitted to the commission. From January to March 1905, the doctor of the town of San Sebastián improvised a modest treatment facility in his municipality. After over six hundred patients overwhelmed municipal officials with their "requests for medicine," in May the town mayor begged the US governor to provide him with the "necessary medicines to cure our anemics."⁵¹Agustín Font to William H. Hunt, May 26, 1905, CA, box 4. The commission awarded San Sebastián medical supplies on the condition that the town doctor travel to Aibonito to receive training at headquarters.⁵²A. H. Frazur to Alcalde de San Sebastián, June 9, 1905, CA, box 4. Similarly, Francisco Sein, the doctor for the town of Lares, organized a rudimentary treatment program after facing increased pressure from peasants. Sein already had experience promoting the control of hookworm. At his own expense, he had published a booklet urging coffee planters, schoolteachers, and neighborhood commissioners to ask people to construct outhouses to "banish the pernicious habit" of soil pollution. He saw the publication as a first step for the "benevolent, worthy, and necessary undertaking" of a "more extensive anti-anemic campaign" in the future.⁵³Francisco Sein, La anemia: Medidas que deben observarse para evitar su propagación (Lares, PR: Tipografía de Bergas, 1905), 3, 7–8. Two months later, the commission supported opening the substation in Lares.⁵⁴A. H. Frazur to Alcalde de Lares, June 15, 1905, box 4, CA.

Municipal petitions and popular demand thus brought the campaign into remote regions of the coffee highlands. After accepting a town's request, the commission provided medical supplies, laboratory equipment, and, if possible, a field technician. More importantly, it trained the town's doctor to standardize the administration of medicine and to record patient data. The municipality, in turn, provided the service facilities and staff. By the end of the 1905–1906 campaign, ten municipalities had established stations through this process. At four of these stations, the arrangement was for the town to bear all expenses and the physicians to offer their services at no cost as long as the commission furnished the medicines.⁵⁵The other six towns that provided physicians and facilities were Barros, Coamo, Comerio, Guayama, Moca, and Utuado. List of towns, CA, box 4. The volunteers included prominent physicians such as Agustín Stahl and Enrique Rodríguez González of Bayamón, Isaac González Martínez and Pedro Malaret of Mayagüez, Francisco Sein y Sein of Lares, and Tulio López Gaztambide and Miguel Roses Artau of Arecibo.⁵⁶Ashford, King, and Gutiérrez Igaravídez, Preliminary Report, 8–9. Through the efforts of Puerto Rican physicians, 18,865 patients had their fecal samples examined, a prescription dispensed, and their medical condition recorded. The commission registered a total of 76,410 visits, including those of patients who returned to the stations for second and third treatments.

Not to be outdone by the efforts of the colonial state, in 1905 the Puerto Rico Medical Association created the Liga de Defensa contra la Anemia (Defense League against Anemia) to complement the work of the commission. The inaugural session was held at the Ateneo Puertorriqueño (Puerto Rican Athenaeum), the meeting place of the island's intellectual elite. The league called on "patriots" of "all classes and social conditions" to recognize the urgent need to fight the disease, hoping that the campaign would turn around Puerto Rico's reputation as an unwholesome and sickly place. One speaker called hookworm a "cruel illness that mercilessly depopulates our fertile landscape."⁵⁷Mariano Ramirez, José Carbonell, Pedro del Valle, and González Martínez to Bailey K. Ashford, July 19, 1905, CA, box 5. For league members, the solution to this problem was not simply treating hookworm patients, but also curtailing the problem of disposing of human feces. To combat the habit of soil pollution, the league proposed disciplinary measures that included requiring individuals to construct latrines in residences and agricultural fields and fining anyone who polluted the soil.⁵⁸"Liga de Defensa contra la Anemia," Boletín de la Asociación Médica de Puerto Rico 3, no. 32 (1905): 116–18. On August 6, 1906, league members ratified eight other articles that recommended provisions for the "most complete extirpation" of hookworm disease. Among the most relevant was the compulsory construction of outhouses in every house and provisional latrines for those working in the agricultural fields, as well as the imposition of fines on anyone who defecated on the soil. A month after these measures were ratified, the colonial government approved the proposed sanitary ordinances.⁵⁹Circular no. 2398, September 25, 1905, CA, box 1.

Medical and civic discourses overlaid each other in the league's crusade. Strict enforcement of the rules of personal hygiene promised to stop disease transmission and cultivate self-discipline among peasants. Reformers appealed to planters by linking hookworm disease to the workers' lack of productivity and the wasted agricultural potential of the land, arguing that hookworm treatment would resurrect the waning coffee economy. The members of the league were motivated not only by a sense of civic duty that marked their professional and moral superiority, but also by the success of the yellow fever campaigns in Havana and in New Orleans. "How we would judge, and how science and the medical world would judge," wrote Agustín Stahl, "if in the last epidemic of yellow fever in New Orleans the doctors had limited themselves to assisting and treating the sick, giving merely secondary attention to exterminating the generating germ of the disease."⁶⁰Agustín Stahl, "Difusión de la uncinaria y Liga de defensa contra la anemia," Boletín de la Asociación Médica de Puerto Rico 3, no. 5 (1905): 160. In their efforts to expand the hookworm campaign, public health advocates referred to the eradication of yellow fever for their own interests while continuing to develop a transnational ethos of disease eradication that linked the work of physicians from Puerto Rico and the United States.

For most of the campaign, it was assumed that soil pollution was the most significant vehicle of infection. It is hardly possible to assess the short-term impact of the crusade in preventing this practice. The fact that the campaign did not manage significantly to stop the rate of hookworm reinfestation is telling of the difficulty the campaign encountered in changing everyday habits, but it is also telling of the dire economic situation in the coffee region after the hurricane. Growers, seeing their profits rapidly decline, were unwilling or unable to provide latrines for workers. They preferred to invest in replenishing their fields or finding new markets. For most peasants, it was simply impossible to carry out the campaign's directions. They worked all day in fields without service facilities. They could not afford to wear shoes, and much less to construct outhouses. This did not mean, however, that the knowledge that peasants had gained about hookworm was not accepted or widely disseminated. Like that of any other process encouraging people to initiate or change behavior, the reception of the anti-soil pollution message was determined by customary practices, environmental conditions, material limitations, social mimicry, moral enforcement, and repetition.

After two years, the commission's work was to become a permanent, island-wide undertaking. In 1906, the legislative assembly passed a law to "create a permanent commission for the suppression of uncinariasis." By "permanent," colonial authorities meant a four-year commission appointed by and under the direct supervision of the governor. At this point, Ashford and King returned to their military service (although both remained honorary members), Gutiérrez Igaravídez became the director of the commission, and Isaac González Martínez of Mayagüez and Francisco Sein of Lares became the other two members. The island was divided in three districts, with one "central" station in the town of Río Piedras and two district stations in the towns of Lares and Mayagüez. Each of these three stations had a similar number of substations under its supervision, but all depended on the central station to collect data and approve budgets. Work began in July 1906 with the opening of six stations. Five towns required stations with hospital service, while six town physicians provided their services free of charge. In the town of Aibonito, the Puerto Rico American Tobacco Company paid the salary of the physician. By the end of the fiscal year, a total of thirty-five stations had examined 89,233 patients and recorded 425,131 visits. During fiscal year 1907–1908, the commission made no essential changes: thirty-five stations remained open and a total of 81,375 patients were treated.

In the following fiscal year, the colonial government made budgetary provisions for continuing the campaign against hookworm. A 1908 law disbanded the commission, and it was replaced by the "Anemia Dispensary Service," a sub-bureau of the Department of Health, Charities, and Corrections, with Gutiérrez Igaravídez retained as its director. During the next two years, the dispensary service increased the number of stations to fifty-five. The campaign had become the first public health service to provide treatment to the majority of the population of the island. In a summary of the ten-year campaign, Ashford and Gutiérrez Igaravídez noted that by November 1910, 272,256 people had received treatment, and they estimated that another 30,000 had been privately treated. In other words, in ten years nearly 30 percent of the population of over one million had been treated for hookworm.⁶¹Ashford and Gutiérrez Igaravídez, Summary, 14–15. According to these estimates, 300,000 persons were treated in a population of approximately 1,118,012.

Although the campaign enjoyed success in terms of numbers of patients treated, the results were not exactly what had been intended. The rate of reinfestations remained high because the serious issues of social inequality were not considered. In the 1920s, Ashford regretted the misplaced confidence arising from the systematic purge of the hookworms in patients. He lamented that by concentrating solely on medication, the hookworm crusade "totally lost sight of our enemies' allies, poverty and malnutrition."⁶²Bailey K. Ashford, The War on the Hookworm (New York: Chemical Foundation, 1926), 29. What was lacking in those early years was a will to decrease the levels of isolation and poverty. Medical treatment alone, in short, was incapable of alleviating poverty's most disturbing manifestations: the reappearance of an easily preventable disease.

The Pursuit of Health

Unlike physicians, politicians, and journalists, who could circulate different opinions about the campaign in the public sphere or print media, the people who visited the dispensaries and took the medicines had few arenas in which to speak. Yet traces of their immensely varied lives persist, however fleetingly and fragmented, in the archival record produced by those in power. Who were those initial patients who overcame the fear of their first medical examination? How do fragmented accounts provide texture and depth to the actions of peasants pursuing hookworm treatment? What meanings did they give to their pursuit of health? The answers to these questions, tentative as they may be, pose several methodological challenges regarding the use of institutional documents to register popular experiences, especially because, although the campaign produced extensive written records, it did not spark any serious struggle that generated judicial case files or trial transcripts. It is possible, however, to partly recover people's experiences, even within the codified structure of institutional sources, by overlapping journalistic accounts, medical records, and photographs, and asking for important details about individual agency.

The case histories of sixty-one "special" patients treated in 1904 in the town of Utuado were preserved in the first Anemia Commission report. As condensed biographies, they provide a limited but invaluable portrait of who these patients were, where they came from, and how they responded to the campaign. Their life stories demand attention because they reveal the realities of a sick and poor population whose voices were often muted in official accounts. These special patients suffered from hookworm disease, but so did many of their parents and siblings. Of the sixty-one cases, twenty-six reported that they had at least one other family member sick with "anemia," and of that number seven had more than three family members who were hookworm sufferers. Twenty-nine cases reported that at least one family member had died of the disease, and in ten of those cases, three or more family members had died of it. Their work opportunities were limited, but they struggled to make ends meet. More than two-thirds of these patients worked on coffee plantations; some of them were women and others were as young as eleven years old. Other patients were cattle herders, tobacco and banana pickers, domestic workers, and washers. Most of these patients lived in the highlands. Many were itinerant workers who moved from plantation to plantation as the coffee matured. Some of them migrated from the coast for the seasonal harvest. They were not homeless, for the most part, but they lived in dilapidated housing. Some patients lived in Utuado, but most had traveled by foot or in hammocks from distant barrios or towns. These patients arrived at the dispensary pale, emaciated, feeble, hopeful, and afraid. All wanted something: to get relief from the disease weakening them.

It would be a mistake to read these case histories, which are both official and personal in scope, as transparent windows into popular attempts to negotiate public health. Yet they leave little doubt of the broad spectrum of experiences of those taking advantage of the first campaign that made their health a crucial political project. Six case studies illustrate their labor patterns, family histories, and health pursuits. M. G., an emaciated sixteen-year-old, could not work in the fields because of the disease. He reported that three of his family members had died from hookworm. Like many other patients, he had suffered from mazamorra and took iron pills to fight against his anemic state. After three months of treatment, he brought five other family members as patients.⁶³Ashford, King, and Gutiérrez Igaravídez, Report of the Commission, lii. F. M. was a forty-year-old woman who, prior to being hospitalized, had worked as a laundress and a coffee-picker to help support her husband and seven children. After a week, she regained enough strength to walk and to return to her family responsibilities.⁶⁴ Ibid., xvii. J. C. S., a twelve-year-old coastal migrant, had been treated previously by Ashford in the coastal town of Ponce, where he sold candies as a street vendor. He was re-infested with the parasite when seasonal harvesting brought him to a coffee plantation in the neighborhood of Arenas. After regaining his strength, J. C. S. ran away to seek work elsewhere.⁶⁵Ibid., xxiii. L. R., a twelve-year-old girl from the distant town of Jayuya, was brought to the dispensary completely emaciated after traveling on a hammock for five days. She died twelve days later in the field hospital.⁶⁶Ibid., xxxviii. M. T. was a single woman in her twenties who, like her three brothers, came to the clinic weakened by the disease. After her recovery, she was hired as a laundress in the field hospital.⁶⁷Ibid., xlv. J. M. B., a thirty-year-old field laborer and the father of five, arrived at the dispensary "profoundly convinced that he was sick, but deeply suspicious and prepared for the worst." After a month of treatment, he was sent home, where he resumed his work.⁶⁸Ibid., lii.

The presence of the commission in Utuado took on a personal immediacy for some of its patients. V. B, a married coffee and banana laborer, "had a small farm on his own until he became too sick to work it. Sold it for a small sum and moved to town to obtain treatment for his sickness." After his recovery, he "proudly boasted that he was able to support his family and no longer begged."⁶⁹Ibid., xii. V. B. may or may not have seen work as a social responsibility or a symbol of moral worth, but his action does demonstrate that he viewed recovering from his sickness as important enough to sell his belongings and move to town. Once he regained his health, he touted his ability to care for his family. The commission's cases also capture some of the struggles prevalent in the coffee region after devastation of San Ciriaco. One case involved a fourteen-year-old boy whose father, after losing everything in the hurricane, was interned in an insane asylum. Five years later, the boy remained orphaned, barefoot, and sick. "This is one case," noted the report, "in which poor food, hard knocks, and abandonment broke down what might have been originally a strong resistance."⁷⁰Ibid., xviii.

None of these patients' stories are unequivocal, and medical and popular expectations cannot be entirely separated. Yet there is no doubt that most peasants felt better after the treatment, and some even experienced dramatic transformations in their bodies. Myriad scattered sources buttress this point. In one case history after another, the report used phrases such as "good color," "gained much weight," and "improved appearance" to describe the patient's transformation. The commission noted, for example, that a thirteen-year-old coffee picker had "so completely changed as hardly to be recognizable by his friends."⁷¹Ibid., xxvi. Similarly, in another case, this time of a seventeen-year-old tobacco picker, it reported that "his facial expression and color has so much changed that his acquaintances did not recognize him on his return home."⁷²Ibid., xxxiii.

Whether by word of mouth or as direct testimony, these stories, like those of the thousands of other patients, must have traveled up and down rivers and trails to family, friends, and neighbors. Peasants in the highlands heard stories that connected the hookworm campaign to family health, household economies, seasonal labor, missing children, sudden deaths, new employment, treatment measures, and physical transformations. Their acts and responses illustrate the multiple ways in which the campaign influenced crucial aspects of daily life. Given that most coffee pickers harbored the parasite for years, their newfound vitality must have transformed their relationship with their bodies and surroundings. These patients incorporated biomedical language in their vocabulary as they recognized the benefits to their own health. As Luis González, the station physician from the town of Humacao, reported to the commission in 1907:

A few days ago a jíbaro presented himself at the station carrying his feces to be examined but the examination was negative, and I said to him: "You have no anemia," to which he replied: "That is a mistake, Doctor; I caught mazamorra the other day, and I must have it." I had to sit down and explain to the patient that he would have to return later, when his mazamorras should have reached his stomach. He did so, and I found the eggs. The country people around here speak very frequently of the necessity of using shoes, of the "microbe" of uncinariasis, of mazamorra in the stomach.⁷³Ashford and Gutiérrez Igaravídez, Uncinariasis in Porto Rico, 219.

González's words cannot be taken entirely at face value, given the report's emphasis on celebrating the campaign. They reveal not only his enthusiasm for the campaign's mission, but also the reach of medical knowledge among peasants who pressured authorities for information and treatment. Moreover, the actions of Puerto Rican physicians and patients in the campaign strengthen the link between public health and the colonial state, regardless of whether or not they actually welcomed the presence of the United States on the island. The physician from the town of Arecibo, for example, celebrated the US presence in the most unabashed terms: "The most beautiful work, the most transcendental and humanitarian that has been effected under the American flag has been, without the slightest doubt, the campaign against uncinariasis."⁷⁴Ibid., 217. At the very least, the doctor knew that the colonial government wanted to be regarded as generous and paternalistic and that it might be willing to back up this image with concrete help.

The spectacular response to the campaign sprang from those directly benefiting from hookworm dispensaries. Juan Román, one of the patients treated in Utuado, wrote to Ashford in 1904. His two letters are the only correspondence from an ordinary Puerto Rican found in the Colección Ashford (Ashford Collection) at the University of Puerto Rico. The handwriting, spelling, and grammar are unclear, but there is no mistaking his point. Román stated that he would be "eternally thankful" to Ashford and Gutiérrez Igaravídez for their "success" with his illness. Deferential and proud, he wrote, "I want you to see that, although poor I always have gratitude for those who treated me like you have." It was no small matter to write such a letter. The composition itself was a struggle, but the letter also carried the possibility of personal mobility. Before leaving the station, Ashford had promised Román a position in the insular police. Román reminded Ashford of his promise and that he was now able to serve on the force.⁷⁵ Juan Román to Bailey K. Ashford, September 23, 1904, CA, box 5, document 321. Writing and sending this letter was more than an act of gratitude. It asserted that health without work is not worth much.

Román was not alone in his desire to move on with his life once he recovered. Francisco Viruet, a fourteen-year-old orphan from Utuado, appeared on the doorstep of Ashford's home in San Juan. According to La correspondencia, the boy said to Ashford, "You have cured me, and I have come to your house so you can educate me or place me." Like many others in the coffee zone, the treatment had clearly shaped the boy's future expectations. Having overcome extraordinary physical weakness, he was now ready to continue his education and improve his social standing, given the opportunity. The paper announced that Francisco was interested in finding a "North American or Puerto Rican protector" to educate him. If this was not possible, Francisco was "willing" to be part of the domestic service in any family willing to take him.⁷⁶"Como aumenta la clientela del doctor Ashford," La correspondencia, August 31, 1904, 1. Francisco understood the position Ashford occupied in society, and sought the doctor's help in pursuing his own uplift after he recuperated.

In Aibonito, Joaquín Sánchez, who had been cured the previous year at the Utuado dispensary, became a town policeman. Eager to contribute to the campaign, he also volunteered as a sanitary inspector. Sánchez "made reports on the construction of latrines, the conditions in the barrios, and assisted very ill patients to reach the hospital."⁷⁷Ashford, King, and Gutiérrez Igaravídez, Preliminary Report, 8. He even inspected many of Aibonito's more distant neighborhoods and some nearby municipalities. That Sánchez went beyond the line of duty points to one of the most overlooked consequences of the campaign. Like others who benefited from the treatment, Sánchez took an interest in the campaign not out of a desire to civilize or discipline others, but as a person moved by the campaign's core promise of health. Sanchez's experience instilled in him a heightened sense of civic responsibility that, in the face of widespread illness, prompted him to reach out to members of his own community.

On the ground, however, very few people benefited from the visits of sanitary inspectors. Only in the 1906 campaign was an inspection service formally established, and even then it was limited to the towns of Rio Píedras, Mayagüez, and Lares. During that fiscal year the number of houses visited totaled 5,556 compared to the 89,233 patients treated in stations and the 425,131 total dispensary visits. These numbers demonstrate that, while the campaign was part of an imperial project, neither colonial authorities nor public health officials broke down doors or coerced people into visiting the dispensaries; highland residences were too remote and too dispersed for such actions to be possible. In addition, state presence and infrastructure were nonexistent. Instead, hundreds of thousands of coffee workers walked to the dispensaries in the pursuit of health. Photographic evidence in the town of Utuado shows this much. In some cases, when hookworm stations were not available, the ill marched to the offices of their local physician or town mayor to ask for treatment. The mass experience of receiving a free medical diagnosis, a medicine specific to the disease, and a rapid and effective cure inaugurated a new understanding of the role of people, health care, and the colonial state.

Colonial Circuits

The US campaign against hookworm began on a colonial possession, but its effects soon began to be felt outside Puerto Rico's shores.⁷⁸In a recent study of US public health in the colonial Philippines, Warwick Anderson argues that colonial administrators transferred and adapted models of public health management back to the United States. See Warwick Anderson, "Pacific Crossings: Imperial Logics in the United States' Public Health Programs," in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 277–87. Information about the Puerto Rico campaign typically flowed from Ashford to various intermediary agents—journalists, physicians, and other military officials—across the ocean through various media, including oral communications, personal correspondence, and printed texts. For North Americans seeking understanding of the new colonial possession, the images of uplift not only provided a means of justifying an imperial project overseas, but also served to make and maintain US imperial identity at home. This essentialist mode of understanding made Puerto Ricans seem uncivilized, poverty-stricken, preindustrial, and dirty, unlike the civilized, affluent, industrious, and clean residents of United States. Readers of the sensationalistic New York Herald learned that Puerto Rican peasants were "hopelessly ignorant," with weak "bodily structures and facial expressions." The author feared that freed from the restraints of hookworm disease, and without the necessary political education to adequately exercise their right to vote, peasants would jeopardize the progress Puerto Rico had achieved under US rule.⁷⁹L. L. Seaman, "Disease Perils Beset Natives of Puerto Rico," New York Herald, January 3, 1905, 2. Hookworm disease thus became an integral part of constructing the opposition between colonizer and colonized, although this stark distinction would erode once the eradication of hookworm disease in the US South became a national priority.

Establishing that Puerto Rico was in fact a sick colony prior to the US arrival had great explanatory power in the continental United States. By bringing this representation into the confines of the white man's burden, US accounts located the campaign within a familiar imperial narrative that extended beyond the confines of the island. "In Puerto Rico that 63 per cent of the population are engaged in agriculture has an important bearing on economic conditions, and the prevalence of uncinariasis is a matter of vital concern," the American Monthly Review of Reviews reported in a 1904 illustrated article. "Near one-fourth of the deaths in the island are from anemia," it added, "and the same disease causes fatal ravages in the Philippines and the Southern States, hence all Americans are concerned."⁸⁰Adam Haeselbarth, "The Puerto Rican Government's Fight with Anemia," American Monthly Review of Reviews 30, no. 174 (1904): 57. The control of hookworm in these locales was an integrative force. It also served to reinforced imperial comparisons of colonial legitimacy. In 1907, William H. Taft, then secretary of war, boasted of the success of US public health efforts in Puerto Rico by comparing the United States to other imperial powers in the region. "Without fostering benevolence," he told an audience in Saint Louis, "this island would be as unhappy and prostate as are some of the neighboring British, French, Dutch, and Danish islands."⁸¹William H. Taft, "Some Recent Instances of National Altruism: The Efforts of the United States to Aid the People of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines," National Geographic Magazine 18, no. 7 (1907): 433–34. Hookworm was a common disease, prevalent in other colonies in Caribbean, but only the United States cultivated public health benevolence.

Communications that began as a lobbying mechanism for the hookworm campaign in Puerto Rico shifted emphasis based on the intended audience. Recall that Ashford's immediate response after first discovering hookworm eggs was to take the patient to a photographer to immortalize his image. He understood early on that his professional career would advance and that the campaign would enjoy more support if his work achieved international recognition. His correspondence often painted a picture of poverty- and disease-ridden peasants benefiting from the altruism of US imperialism. But Ashford also felt compelled to acknowledge how much his work on the campaign had changed his relation to the island and its people. After two years of working with the commission, he returned to military service. In one of his first trips back to the United States, Ashford confided to his mother: "I leave this lovely island with a host of dearly and beloved friends, and with the keen appreciation that the five or six years of toil for the good of the Puerto Rican peasant is beginning to be felt among the people at large."⁸² Bailey K. Ashford to Mrs. Francis Ashford, March 4, 1906, CA, box 6.

Ashford was fortunate to find in William C. Gorgas a sponsor willing to disseminate his findings to as many physicians as possible. Gorgas had worked with poor rural whites without knowing the cause of their anemia. "When you first pointed out in Puerto Rico that tropical anemia was due to ankylostamiasis," Gorgas wrote to Ashford, "I recognized the fact that the tropical anemia I have been treating for years in Pensacola, Fla., were many cases of that disease."⁸³William C. Gorgas to Bailey K. Ashford, December 3, 1903, CA, box 6. Gorgas acted as a broker of information by passing news about the disease in Puerto Rico on to other colleagues and asking the editors of medical journals in the US South to reproduce Ashford's articles. In one of those requests, Gorgas admitted that because he had seen first-hand the suffering of "poor whites" and the "cracker class" of "our southern states," he was committed to spreading information about the campaign among physicians "who practice among such people."⁸⁴William C. Gorgas to the editor of the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, January 22, 1904, CA, box 6. Ashford also capitalized on his mounting professional status to broadcast his work. He distributed reports to doctors across the globe, including prominent physicians like Victor G. Geiser in the Philippines and Ronald Ross in England. At the same time, he received requests for hookworm literature from doctors living in distant places such as Ecuador and Hawaii.

Because physicians soon found evidence that the disease that afflicted Puerto Rican peasants was also widespread among poor whites in the US South, calls to launch a similar anti-hookworm program on the mainland swelled. "Since Ashford first showed the prevalence [of hookworm] in that island," the New York Herald noted, "physicians roused to investigation have discovered cases in many of the southern states."⁸⁵L. L. Seaman, "Puerto Rico Ravaged by Disease that Threatens to Annihilate Natives," New York Herald, December 31, 1904, 2. Initially, the endemic presence of hookworm provided considerable justification for accounts that portrayed both places as benighted and backward. The distinction between the sickly inhabitants of the Puerto Rico and US South blurred, making the jíbaro a mirror image, and not a contrasting one, of poor rural whites. A popular new moniker for hookworm that linked the "cracker class" in the US South to other populations appeared repeatedly in major US newspapers and magazines. In 1902, after listening to Charles W. Stiles present in the first meeting of the Pan American Sanitary Bureau, a New York Sun reporter published his story with the headline "Germ of Laziness Found? Disease of the Crackers and of Some Nations Identified." The reporter emphasized that while the "germ of laziness" affected primarily poor whites in the South, it might also explain the "backward condition" of the people in South America. The author also declared Stiles the "discoverer of uncinariasis or hookworm disease."⁸⁶Irving Norwood, "Germ of Laziness Found? Disease of the Crackers and of Some Nations Identified," New York Sun, December 5, 1902. See also Ettling, Germ of Laziness, 35–38; and Wray, Not Quite White, 104–108.

Ashford never embraced the term "germ of laziness," perhaps because he associated it with his rival, Stiles, or because he knew well the struggles of the peasants who visited hookworm stations. Still, the "germ of laziness" helped to reconfigure the racial geography of hookworm disease through associations that connected and crossed regional and colonial distinctions. Newspapers and magazines in the United States reiterated associations between peasants in Puerto Rico and poor whites in the South with banner headlines such as "An Epidemic of Laziness: A Whole Region in Puerto Rico Afflicted with the Lazy Worm," "Getting Tired of Laziness: Puerto Ricans Eager for Treatment to Cure the Disease Caused by the 'Lazy Worm,'" "War on Lazy Worm: Good Effects of the Campaign in Puerto Rico," and "Wiping Out Lazy Disease: Already Nearly 10,000 Cures in Puerto Rico."⁸⁷"An Epidemic of Laziness, A Whole Region in Puerto Rico Afflicted with the Lazy Worm," New York Times, June 23, 1905; "Getting Tired of Laziness: Puerto Ricans Eager for Treatment to Cure the Disease Caused by the 'Lazy Worm'" New York Herald, June 24, 1905; "War on Lazy Worm: Good Effects of the Campaign in Puerto Rico," Star, September 15, 1905; and "Wiping Out Lazy Disease: Already Nearly 10,000 Cures in Puerto Rico," Philadelphia Reword, September 15, 1905. A photo essay singled out the Puerto Rican campaign to ease existing preoccupations about race and labor in the US South by emphasizing the rehabilitating role of medical science: "Photographic Illustrations of the Campaign Which Has Changed a Lazy Race into One of Energetic Workers."⁸⁸"Laziness Banished from the Island of Puerto Rico," New York Herald, June 24, 1905. Imperial prejudices about colonial subjects and northern prejudices about poor whites inflected one another through the textual and visual juxtapositions. Yet the fact that the "germ of laziness" was an intestinal parasite that could be purged from the body, and not an intrinsic manifestation of laziness, propelled progressive reformers in the United States to aggressively call for a public health campaign.

The association or conflation of hookworm images in Puerto Rico and in the US South was not exclusive to the print media in the United States. Newspapers in Puerto Rico also joined in public discussion about the hookworm campaign developing in the US South. Much to the dismay of Ashford, who had led hookworm efforts since 1899, La correspondencia published in 1909 "Los pálidos del sur" (The pale ones of the South) a cover story whose illustrations included a picture of Stiles with a caption that claimed that he was the discoverer of hookworm. Compounding the offense, the photos grouped around Stiles's image had been taken by Ashford himself: one was of a boy named Juan Serrano, taken in the Utuado field hospital, and another was of an intestinal cross-section showing the presence of worms.⁸⁹René Bauch, "Los pálidos del sur," La correspondencia, November 5, 1909. The piece provoked Ashford to voice his "outraged sense of justice." Ashford told the director of La correspondencia that "Puerto Rico alone awakened the continent of the United States to a realization that the disease . . . was responsible for the present epidemic in the United States of the Union." Besides pointing out that his campaign had spearheaded recent public health efforts in the South, he denounced the piece as an example of collective and personal calumny. "Instead of showing to the United States another occasion in which this island we say we love had been of enormous utility to the American people," Ashford complained, "you deliberately permit a writer of your columns to give priority to a man [Stiles] whose inspiration has come from this very island."⁹⁰Ashford to the director of La correspondencia, November 7, 1909, CA, box 6. Ashford wanted to clarify the record about his scientific and public health achievements as well as to establish the trailblazing role of Puerto Rico in inspiring the efforts of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission. He was aware that, without the media and financial resources that Rockefeller had to disseminate this information, the origins of the campaign could be forgotten not only on the US mainland but in Puerto Rico as well.

By the time John D. Rockefeller, who sought to redeem his reputation as a robber baron, created the Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm, the networks of knowledge exchange that connected Puerto Rico to the United States were well established. To be sure, the guarantee of one million in funding over five years made a crucial difference in the southern campaign. Frederick T. Gates headed the commission, but its administrative and scientific secretaries were educator Wickliffe Rose and zoologist Stiles. Although Stiles knew more than anyone about hookworm disease, he had no on-the-ground experience in directing a public health campaign. On May 29, 1910, Rose sailed to Puerto Rico, where he turned to Ashford for advice about how to carry out a hookworm campaign.⁹¹See Ettling, Germ of Laziness, 125–30; William Link, "'The Harvest Is Ripe, but the Laborers are Few': The Hookworm Crusade in North Carolina, 1909–1915," North Carolina Historical Review 67 (1990): 1–27; and J. D. Woody, "The Hookworm Campaign in North Carolina," North Carolina Medical Journal 53, no. 2 (1992): 106–9. Rose spent three weeks traveling the island with Ashford, who provided him with the contact information of hookworm experts in Oxford, London, Liége, Madrid, Brussels, and Cairo. Rose came away from the visit thoroughly impressed, hoping to reciprocate by assisting Puerto Rico with its own efforts against the disease.⁹²Wickliffe Rose to Bailey K. Ashford, June 23, 1910, Rockefeller Sanitary Commission Collection (hereafter RSC), Rockefeller Archive Center. Governor George Colton and Ashford had made it clear that they would not be adverse to financial assistance. At Rose's invitation, Ashford later visited the United States to give a series of lectures on hookworm. Despite their friendly exchanges, Rockefeller's gift was specifically earmarked for the US South. As a result, the commission did not see fit to fund hookworm efforts in Puerto Rico.⁹³Bailey K. Ashford to Wickliffe Rose, October 24, 1911; August 18, 1912; and April 21, 1914, RSC.

As the impetus for a hookworm eradication campaign in the US South gained popularity on the mainland, the limited effectiveness of establishing parallels between Puerto Rican jíbaros and poor whites became apparent. In the 1900s, as pointed out earlier, US perceptions of Puerto Rico often suffused racializing discourses of southern particularity. Yet, as Matt Wray has argued, because the hookworm campaign in the US South was established at the moment when the legal apparatus of Jim Crow attacked the participation of blacks in politics and the economy, "drawing too many parallels between the poor white inhabitants and other colonized populations posed a problem" for advocates of the New South. Since hookworm promoters wanted "to persuade elites about the racial purity of poor whites, then it would weaken their argument to suggest that poor whites had much in common with colonized, racially inferior people."⁹⁴Bailey K. Ashford to Wickliffe Rose, October 24, 1911; August 18, 1912; and April 21, 1914, RSC. Hookworm activists had little interest in casting any doubt among wealthy elites about the possibility of turning poor whites into productive white workers by associating them with Puerto Rican peasants. This calibration redefined the process of racial formation to appease fears that the transformation of jíbaros and poor whites by the campaign would make the two populations too similar, rather than help maintain the two populations as distinct.

The networks of hookworm exchanges that Ashford helped create only grew as the decade progressed. In fact, they grew so unwieldy after the Rockefeller Foundation launched its international eradication program that Ashford's significance in them faded over time. Moreover, Ashford eventually began to reconsider eradication as a realistic goal, although his experience in Puerto Rico showed that, at least in the short run, treatment and careful organization of resources could bring dramatic health results to people. He knew that wearing shoes minimized contact with the ground and that using privies broke the transmission route between the soil and the gut. Eradication was attainable, but it was by no means a simple objective. At its root was poverty. In Puerto Rico, as in the US South, and across the "tropical belt," the disease's severity depended on economic circumstances. Limited resources had to address not simply a debilitating ailment, but also structural layers of afflictions.

Conclusion

To historicize the crossing of Puerto Rico's hookworm campaign complicates our understanding of both the men and women who embraced it and its profound impact in the United States. The basic assumptions that have guided scholarly interpretations of this campaign have focused principally either on the medical construction of the peasant or on the campaign as a derivative project of US imperialism. These assumptions have been informed by the most influential source on the campaign: the 418-page autobiography of Bailey K. Ashford. Yet, Ashford's pristine narrative of achievements is disrupted by a wealth of archival evidence, much of it collected by Ashford himself, that shows the ways Puerto Rican doctors and peasants sought opportunities for themselves. Giving attention to these sources opens up interpretations that transcend the imperial gaze and illuminate both on-the-ground responses and interactions between peasants and medical authorities.

Moreover, although the hookworm campaign was part of the post-1898 expansion of American military medicine in the tropics, the campaign in Puerto Rico, in contrast to the public health work in Cuba, took place in a colonial setting under US civilian, not military, rule. Hookworm disease, unlike yellow fever, was not a high-priority disease affecting US commerce, nor was it tied to elite anxieties about white immigration. In Puerto Rico there was no figure like Carlos Finlay who could claim misappropriation of scientific recognition and generate nationalist sentiment. Instead, the campaign was spearheaded by a US military physician who was denied due credit by a US zoologist. Yet not unlike yellow fever in Cuba the meanings of the hookworm campaign extended beyond the so-called object-lessons of colonial administrators. Unequal imperial structures shaped part of the conflicts, negotiations, and compromises that constituted the hookworm campaign, but did not overdetermine its outcomes.

The campaign did lead to a profound reassessment of the poor peasants. Hookworm activists, rather than portraying them as victims, portrayed them as a source of medical—and paternalist—uplift. Through their efforts the figure of the jíbaro entered the national imaginary in a new way. But what does the redeemed jíbaro look like? One year after the first campaign against hookworm campaign ended in Utuado, Ramón Frade completed a painting thematically opposite to the cautionary tales of the nineteenth century. In Pan nuestro (Our bread; c. 1905), Frade, a painter from the tobacco- and coffee-growing town of Cayey, endowed the Puerto Rican peasant with a hopeful, dignified future. While the painting was clearly influenced by European aesthetic currents, it represented the sublime beauty of the peasant by emphasizing his forward movement. Within the canvas, the majestic mountain and the luminous sky pull back as the peasant walks toward the viewer, carrying in his hand the fruits of his labor.⁹⁵For a comprehensive biography of Frade, see Osiris Delgado, Ramón Frade León, pintor puertorriqueño (1875–1954): Un virtuoso del intelecto (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe con la colaboracion del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Academia Puertorriqueña de la Historia, 1989). For an overview of Puerto Rican art, see José Torres Martinó, "Puerto Rican Art in the Early Twentieth Century," in Puerto Rico—arte e identidad, edited by Hermandad de artistas gráficos de Puerto Rico (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1998), 83–88. The visual vocabulary of Frade's painting struck a powerful chord among Puerto Ricans because it was validated by the context in which it was produced. The image of a moving peasant, while idealized, was not far-fetched. After the hookworm campaign started, tens of thousands of coffee workers visited the provisional dispensaries in the pursuit of health. When hookworm facilities were not available, they marched again to the offices of the local physicians and mayors to ask for the treatment they now expected the state to provide. Similarly, when employment opportunities were not available in the highlands, thousands of mountain dwellers moved to the coastal plains or urban centers in search of jobs. These claims produced new anxieties about the stability of social hierarchies, which eventually facilitated the nostalgic construction of the jíbaro as a national icon.

Similarly, personal, institutional, and political interests converged to generate multiple, and at times contradictory, images of the hookworm campaign in Puerto Rico. In the United States, the media's fascination with the campaign reflected its quest to justify US imperial rule. Ironically, in establishing a parallelism between Puerto Rican peasants and poor southern whites, media accounts not only attempted to advocate for a campaign in the US South similar to the one initiated in the colony, but also established an equivalence that distanced both groups from US elite white men. When emissaries from the Rockefeller Foundation set out to undertake the hookworm program in the South, tens of thousands of diseased Puerto Ricans had already been treated. Poor whites became as redeemable as Puerto Rican peasants. This association changed the ways many US residents, especially in the North, thought about the bodies of poor whites and the US South. By bringing their civilizing mission back "home," Rockefeller officials, just like the hookworm advocates had done in Puerto Rico, redefined the stereotype of the poor rural dweller through medicalized images.

In the years following the Puerto Rico campaign, hookworm eradication became a prominent public health issue in other nations. Like the yellow fever campaign in Cuba, the hookworm campaign inspired public health administrators in Brazil. Their efforts to translate the campaign engendered new debates about state power, national identity, and US empire. As the hookworm campaign model reached other corners of the globe, the terms of these debates would shift and transform. They would need to be readjusted before working in distinct, but increasingly entangled, national contexts.

Acknowledgments

Southern Spaces thanks Vanderbilt University Press for their permission to reprint this chapter in its entirety.

About the Author

José Amador is associate professor of Global and Intercultural Studies (Latin American, Latino/a, and Caribbean Studies) at Miami University. His first book, Medicine and Nation Building in the Americas, 1890–1940 (Vanderbilt University Press, 2015), was awarded the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize for best project in the area of medicine. He is also the co-editor of Historia y memoria: sociedad, cultura y vida cotidiana en Cuba (Centro de la Cultura Cubana Juan Marinello, 2003). He has published essays on Puerto Rican Afro-diasporic music and on the founder of the Cuban journal Pensamiento crítico.

The teenagers in this clip from Seventeen, a teen dance show broadcast by WOI-TV to central Iowa in the late-1950s, did not need to know this history to appreciate that Willis's "Betty and Dupree" was a perfect song for dancing the Stroll, even if they did so awkwardly. The teens on Seventeen were emulating their peers in Philadelphia who popularized the dance on the nationally broadcast American Bandstand. Less obviously, the Iowa teens were also emulating teens on The Mitch Thomas Show—a black teen dance show that broadcast locally from Wilmington, Delaware, to the Philadelphia area—whose version of the Stroll influenced the American Bandstand dancers.

While Des Moines, Iowa, may be a long way from the South geographically, television connected Iowa teens to music and dance styles flowing from Delaware, Georgia, South Carolina, and elsewhere. Seventeen was one of dozens of locally broadcast teen dance shows in this era. Each show featured musical performances and records alongside dancing teenagers. The simplicity and profitability of the teen dance show format appealed to television stations, but airing images of youth music culture was a complicated proposition that involved television technologies, network affiliations, marketing, and racial segregation. This essay examines four programs that brought music and dance to southern and border state audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. I focus on three black teen shows, The Mitch Thomas Show from Wilmington, Delaware (1955–1958); Teenage Frolics (1958–1983), hosted by Raleigh, North Carolina, deejay J. D. Lewis; and Washington, DC's Teenarama Dance Party (1963–1970), hosted by Bob King. In addition, I examine Washington's The Milt Grant Show (1956–1961), which allowed only white dancers.

These shows broadcast in an era when civil rights lawsuits and protests sought to overturn policies of racial segregation in schools and public spaces in the South. Wilmington and Washington were the sites of two of the school segregation cases, Belton v. Gebhart and Bolling v. Sharpe, which the Supreme Court combined into Brown v. Board of Education. In Raleigh, token school integration did not begin until 1960, six years after Brown.³Sarah Caroline Thuesen, Greater Than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919 –1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 225–229. That same year, black students from St. Augustine University and Shaw University staged sit-ins at lunch counters in Raleigh to protest the whites-only policies at Woolworths and other stores.⁴Jeffrey Crow, Paul Escott, and Flora Hatley, A History of African Americans in North Carolina (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1992). Televisual representations and photographs of civil rights protests in Little Rock, Greensboro, Birmingham, Jackson, Selma, and other cities also made images of the South highly politicized.⁵Aniko Bodroghkozy, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Martin Berger, Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Part of the power of television for civil rights activists was how the medium exposed excessive acts of physical violence to audiences outside the South. In the midst of the voting rights marches in Selma in 1965, for example, Martin Luther King told marchers and the news media, "We are here to say to the white men that we no longer will let them use clubs on us in the dark corners. We're going to make them do it in the glaring light of television."⁶Quoted in Bodrogkozy, Equal Time, 2.

 In the context of pitched battles over segregation and civil rights, these televised teen dance shows reveal much about the visibility of different youth musical cultures in the 1950s and 1960s. First, The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama Dance Party were important for black teens because the shows offered televisual spaces that valued their creative energies and talents. As historian Earl Lewis has noted, when African Americans faced Jim Crow policies in parks, swimming pools, and movie theaters, they developed separate recreation sites through which they turned segregation into "congregation."⁷"Afro-Americans who lived in communities as diverse as Chicago, Norfolk, and Buxton, Iowa, congregated—sometimes along class lines, but always together," Earl Lewis argues. "In the southern context, congregation was important because it symbolized an act of free will, whereas segregation represented the imposition of another's will." Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 91–92. Unlike other racially segregated leisure spaces, however, television brought the sounds and images of black music cultures to viewers of all colors across and beyond the cities from which the shows broadcast. Second, television technology worked to enhance and/or limit the visibility of different youth musical cultures. Broadcasting from Wilmington, Raleigh, and Washington, these shows reached regional audiences, but varied in terms of signal strength and network affiliations. Differences in terms of station power and stability shaped the duration of each program. Finally, the visibility these shows offered to teenagers was closely tied to the salability of teen music culture. For The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama Dance Party this meant trying to attract sponsors to advertise to black television audiences. For The Milt Grant Show, this meant airing black music performances while maintaining a segregated studio audience that would appeal to sponsors.

I became interested in these teen dance shows while researching and writing a book on American Bandstand. Counter to host Dick Clark's claims that he integrated American Bandstand, my research revealed how the first national television program directed at teens discriminated against black youth during its early years and how black teens and civil rights advocates protested this discrimination.⁸Matthew Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). Like American Bandstand, the local programs I explore in this essay brought dynamic music cultures to eager audiences and advertisers, while they also traced the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in their cities. Unlike American Bandstand, or Soul Train, which started broadcasting nationally in 1971, The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, Teenarama Dance Party, and The Milt Grant Show are not well known outside of their local broadcast markets. Among these four programs, only one recording is known to exist, a 1957 episode of The Milt Grant Show recorded to sell the show to sponsors. With limited televisual evidence, my analysis draws on archival documents, promotional materials, newspapers, photographs, and interviews to explore how these shows got on and stayed on the air and what they meant to their audiences. By examining these local programs this essay builds on the work of scholars Norma Coates, Murray Forman, Julie Malnig, Tim Wall, George Lipsitz, and Brian Ward who have examined the intersections of music and television, the importance of televised teen dance shows as community spaces, and the development of rhythm and blues and rock and roll.⁹Norma Coates, "Elvis from the Waist Up and Other Myths: 1950s Music Television and the Gendering of Rock Discourse," in Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones, eds. Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 226–251; Coates, "Filling in Holes: Television Music as a Recuperation of Popular Music on Television," Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 1, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 21–25; Murray Forman, One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Julie Malnig, "Let's Go to the Hop: Community Values in Televised Teen Dance Programs of the 1950s," Dance & Community: Proceedings of The Congress on Research in Dance (August, 2006): 171–175; Tim Wall, "Rocking Around the Clock: Teenage Dance Fads from 1955 to 1965," in Ballrooms, Boogie, Shimmy, Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, ed. Julie Malnig (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 182–198; George Lipsitz, Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

The Mitch Thomas Show

The Mitch Thomas Show debuted on August 13, 1955, on WPFH, an unaffiliated television station that broadcast to Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley from Wilmington.¹⁰"The NAACP Reports: WCAM (Radio)," August 7, 1955, NAACP collection, URB 6, box 21, folder 423, TUUA. Born in West Palm Beach, Florida, Mitch Thomas graduated from Delaware State College and served in the army before becoming the first black disc jockey in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1949.¹¹Eustace Gay, "Pioneer In TV Field Doing Marvelous Job Furnishing Youth With Recreation," Philadelphia Tribune, February 11, 1956; Gary Mullinax, "Radio Guided DJ to Stars," The News Journal Papers (Wilmington, DE), January 28, 1986, D4. His television show, broadcast every Saturday, resembled Philadelphia's Bandstand, at the time a local program hosted by Bob Horn, and other locally broadcast teenage dance programs. The Mitch Thomas Show stood out because it was the first television show hosted by a black deejay that featured a studio audience of black teenagers. Otis Givens, who lived in South Philadelphia and attended Ben Franklin High School, remembered that he watched the show every weekend for a year before he finally made the trip to Wilmington to dance on air. "When I got back to Philly, and everyone had seen me on TV, I was big time," Givens recalled. "We weren't able to get into Bandstand, [but] The Mitch Thomas Show gave me a little fame. I was sort of a celebrity at local dances."¹²Otis Givens, interview with author, June 27, 2007. Similarly, South Philadelphia teen Donna Brown recalled in a 1995 interview, "I remember at the same time that Bandstand used to come on, there used to be a black dance thing that came on, and it was The Mitch Thomas Show . . . And that was something for the black kids to really identify with. Because you would look at Bandstand and we thought it was a joke."¹³Quoted in John Roberts, From Hucklebuck to Hip-Hop: Social Dance in the African American Community in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Odunde, 1995), 37. The Mitch Thomas Show also became a frequent topic for the black teenagers who wrote the Philadelphia Tribune's "Teen-Talk" columns. Much in the same way that national teen magazines followed American Bandstand, the Tribune's teen writers kept tabs on the performers featured on Thomas's show, and described the teenagers who formed fan clubs to support their favorite musical artists and deejays.¹⁴On the Philadelphia Tribune's "Teen-Talk" coverage of Mitch Thomas' show, see "They're 'Movin' and Groovin,'" Philadelphia Tribune, July 31, 1956; Dolores Lewis, "Talking With Mitch," Philadelphia Tribune, November 9, 1957; Lewis, "Stage Door Spotlight," Philadelphia Tribune, November 9, 1957; Laurine Blackson, "Penny Sez," Philadelphia Tribune, December 7, 1957 and April 26, 1958; Dolores Lewis, "Philly Date Line," Philadelphia Tribune, December 7, 1957; "Queen Lane Apartment Group [photo]," Philadelphia Tribune, December 7, 1957; Jimmy Rivers, "Crickets' Corner," Philadelphia Tribune, January 21 and April 22, 1958; Edith Marshall, "Current Hops," Philadelphia Tribune, March 1, 8 and 22, 1958; Marshall, "Talk of the Teens," Philadelphia Tribune, March 22, 1958; and "Presented in Charity Show [Mitch Thomas photo]," Philadelphia Tribune, April 22, 1958. The fan gossip shared in these columns documented the growth of a youth culture among the black teenagers whom Bandstand excluded. In 1957, it was one of these fan clubs that made the most forceful challenge to Bandstand's discriminatory admissions policies.¹⁵Art Peters, "Negroes Crack Barrier of Bandstand TV Show," Philadelphia Tribune, October 5, 1957; "Couldn't Keep Them Out [photo]," Philadelphia Tribune, October 5, 1957; Delores Lewis, "Bobby Brooks' Club Lists 25 Members," Philadelphia Tribune, December 14, 1957. Although many of these teens watched both Bandstand and Thomas's show, as Bandstand grew in popularity and expanded into a national program, The Mitch Thomas Show remained the only television program that represented the region's black rock and roll fans.

Economics, more than a concern for racial equality, influenced WPFH's decision to provide airtime for this groundbreaking show. Eager to compete with Bandstand and the afternoon offerings on the other network-affiliated stations, WPFH hoped that Thomas's show would appeal to both black and white youth in the same way as black-oriented radio.¹⁶On the crossover appeal of black-oriented radio, see Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2004); William Barlow, Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); and Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (New York: Times Books, 1999), 219–255. The station's bet on Thomas was part of a larger strategy that included hiring white disc jockeys Joe Grady and Ed Hurst to host a daily afternoon dance program that started at 5 p.m., after Bandstand concluded its daily broadcast. While The Grady and Hurst Show broadcast five times per week, the weekly Mitch Thomas Show proved to be more influential.

Drawing on Thomas's contacts as a radio host and on the talents of the teenagers, the program helped shape the music tastes and dance styles of young people in Philadelphia. In a 1998 interview for the documentary Black Philadelphia Memories, Thomas recalled that "the show was so strong that I could play a record one time and break it wide open."¹⁷Black Philadelphia Memories, directed by Trudi Brown (Philadelphia, WHYY-TV12, 1999), television documentary. Indeed, Thomas's show hosted some of the biggest names in rock and roll, including Ray Charles, Little Richard, the Moonglows, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. It also featured vocal harmony groups from the Philadelphia area.¹⁸"Teen-Age 'Superiors' Debut on M.T. Show," Philadelphia Tribune, November 19, 1957. Thomas promoted large stage shows as well as small record hops at skating rinks.¹⁹On Mitch Thomas' concerts, see Archie Miller, "Fun & Thrills," Philadelphia Tribune, December 4, 1956; "Rock 'n Roll Show & Dance," Philadelphia Tribune, April 19, 1958; "Swingin' the Blues," Philadelphia Tribune, August 5, 1958; "Mitch Thomas Show Attracts Over 2000," Philadelphia Tribune, August 18, 1958; "Don't Miss the Mitch Thomas Rock & Roll Show," Philadelphia Tribune, July 2, 1960. These events were often racially integrated, "The whites that came, they just said, 'Well I'm gonna see the artist and that's it.' I brought Ray Charles in there on a Sunday night, and it was just beautiful to look out there and see everything just nice."²⁰Mullinax, "Radio Guided DJ to Stars."

Ray Smith, who attended American Bandstand frequently and has done research for one of Dick Clark's histories of the show, remembers that he and other white teenagers watched The Mitch Thomas Show to learn new dance steps. Describing the "black Bandstand," Smith recalled:

First of all, black kids had their own dance show, I think it was on channel 12, but one of the reasons I remember it is because I watched it. And I remember that there was a dance that [American Bandstand regulars] Joan Buck and Jimmy Peatross did called "The Strand" and it was a slow version of the jitterbug done to slow records. And it was fantastic. There were two black dancers on this show, the "black Bandstand," or whatever you want to call it. The guy's name was Otis and I don't remember the girl's name. And I always was like "wow." And then I saw Jimmy Peatross and Joan Buck do it, who were probably the best dancers who were ever on Bandstand. I was talking about it to Jimmy Peatross one day, when I was putting together the book, and he said, "Oh, I watched this black couple do it." And that was the black couple that he watched.²¹Ray Smith, interview with author, August 10, 2006. Jimmy Peatross and Joan Buck tell a related story about learning how to do The Strand from black teenagers in Twist, directed by Ron Mann (Sphinx Productions, 1992), documentary.

These white teenagers were not alone in watching The Mitch Thomas Show. Smith's experience supports Mitch Thomas's belief that [American Bandstand teens] "were looking to see what dance steps we were putting out. All you had to do was look at 'Bandstand' the next Monday, and you'd say, 'Oh yeah, they were watching.'"²²Ibid. They were watching, for example, when dancers on The Mitch Thomas Show started dancing The Stroll, a group dance where boys and girls faced each other in two parallel lines, while couples took turns strutting down the aisle. Thomas remembers that the teens on his show "created a dance called The Stroll. I was standing there watching them dancing in a line, and after a while I asked them, 'What are y'all doing out there?' They said, 'That's The Stroll.' And The Stroll became a big thing."²³Black Philadelphia Memories, dir. Trudi Brown. Because the show influenced American Bandstand during its first year as a national program, teenagers across the country learned dances popularized by The Mitch Thomas Show.

Despite its success among black and white teenagers, Thomas's show remained on television for only three years, from 1955 to 1958. His short-lived television career resembled the experiences of other African American entertainers who hosted music and variety shows in this era. The Nat King Cole Show (1956–1957) failed to attract national advertisers and lasted only one year. Before Cole, shows hosted by black singers Lorenzo Fuller (1947) and Billy Daniels (1952) and the variety program Sugar Hill Times (1949) also fared poorly. Among local programs, the Al Benson Show and Richard Stamz's Open the Door Richard both had brief periods of success in 1950s Chicago.²⁴J. Fred MacDonald, Blacks and White TV: African Americans in Television Since 1948 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1983), 17–21, 57–64; Jannette Dates, "Commercial Television," in Split Image: African Americans and the Mass Media, ed., Davis and Barlow (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1993), 267–327; Christopher Lehman, A Critical History of Soul Train on Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2008), 28; Richard Stamz, Give 'Em Soul, Richard! (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 62–63, 77–78; Barlow, Voice Over, 98–103.

The failure of the station that broadcast The Mitch Thomas Show underscores the tenuous nature of such unaffiliated local programs. Storer Broadcasting Company purchased WPFH in 1956.²⁵Herbert Howard, Multiple Ownership in Television Broadcasting (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 142–147. Storer frequently bought and sold stations and, at the time of the WPFH acquisition, it also owned stations in Toledo, Cleveland, Atlanta, Miami, and Portland. Storer changed WPFH's call letters to WVUE and hoped to move the station's facilities from Wilmington closer to Philadelphia. The plan faltered, and the station suffered significant operating losses over the next year.²⁶Ibid. Thomas's show was among the first victims of the station's financial problems. While advertisers started to pay more attention to black consumers in the 1950s, a product-identification stigma lingered throughout the decade, preventing many brands from sponsoring black programs.²⁷Barlow, Voice Over, 129; Giacomo Ortizano, "One Your Radio: A Descriptive History of Rhythm-and-blues Radio During the 1950s" (PhD dissertation, Ohio University, 1993), 391–423. WVUE cancelled The Mitch Thomas Show in June 1958, citing the program's lack of sponsorship and low ratings compared to the network shows in Thomas's Saturday timeslot.²⁸Art Peters, "Mitch Thomas Fired From TV Dance Party Job," Philadelphia Tribune, June 17, 1958. Shortly after firing Thomas, Storer announced plans to sell WVUE in order to buy a station in Milwaukee as FCC regulations required multiple broadcast owners to divest from one license in order to buy another. Unable to find a buyer for WVUE, Storer turned the station license back to the government, and the station went dark in September 1958.²⁹Howard, Multiple Ownership in Television Broadcasting, 146. The manager of WVUE later told broadcasting historian Gerry Wilkerson, "No one can make a profit with a TV station unless affiliated with NBC, CBS or ABC." As Dick Clark and American Bandstand celebrated the one-year anniversary of the show's national debut, local broadcast competition brought The Mitch Thomas Show's groundbreaking three-year run to an unceremonious end. Thomas continued to work as a radio disc jockey through the 1960s, until he left broadcasting in 1969 to work as a counselor to gang members in Wilmington.

The Mitch Thomas Show usefully troubles the boundary between the South and the North. Historian Brett Gadsden describes Delaware as "a provincial hybrid, one in which ostensibly southern and northern modes of race relations operated."³⁰Brett Gadsden, Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 7. Many teens who danced on The Mitch Thomas Show or watched the program would have experienced de jure school segregation and the slow realization of educational equality promised by Brown. At the same time, WPHF's Wilmington studios were only thirty miles from Philadelphia, a city that, historian Matthew Countryman notes, many black people called "Up South."³¹Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 10. The Mitch Thomas Show teenagers would also have been familiar with segregation as practiced in Philadelphia and televised on American Bandstand. Carried out more covertly, this northern-style segregation was no less intentional or demeaning.³²On the limitations of the de jure/de facto framework, see Matthew Lassiter, "De Jure/De Facto Segregation: The Long Shadow of a National Myth," in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, eds., Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 25–48. On race and segregation in Philadelphia, see Countryman, Up South; Countryman, "'From Protest to Politics': Community Control and Black Independent Politics in Philadelphia, 1965–1984,"Journal of Urban History 32 (September 2006): 813–861; Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town; James Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Wolfinger, "The Limits of Black Activism: Philadelphia's Public Housing in the Depression and World War II," Journal of Urban History 35 (September 2009): 787–814; Guian McKee, The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2008); McKee, "'I've Never Dealt with a Government Agency Before': Philadelphia's Somerset Knitting Mills Project, the Local State, and the Missed Opportunities of Urban Renewal," Journal of Urban History 35 (March 2009): 387–409; and Lisa Levenstein, A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Seeing The Mitch Thomas Show as "between North and South" highlights the constant negotiation of sectional identities and imaginaries.

Teenage Frolics

J. D. Lewis' Teenage Frolics, which aired from 1958 to 1983, stayed on the air longer than any other local teen dance program. A graduate of Morehouse College and a World War II veteran, John Davis (J. D.) Lewis, Jr. started his radio career at Raleigh's WRAL in 1947 as a morning deejay playing gospel music. A. J. Fletcher and Fred Fletcher's Capitol Broadcasting Company, which owned WRAL, received a TV license in 1956 and Lewis played an important role in convincing the Federal Communications Comission (FCC) that WRAL-TV would serve African American viewers.³³Clarence Williams, "JD Lewis Jr.: A Living Broadcasting Legend," Ace: Magazine of the Triangle, September–October 2002, 12–14, 70. Unlike The Mitch Thomas Show and Teenarama, Teenage Frolics aired on a VHF (very high frequency) station with a network affiliation (WRAL-TV had a primary affiliation with NBC and a secondary affiliation with ABC).³⁴"WRAL-TV," 1960 Broadcasting Yearbook, A–73 Despite these network ties, WRAL proved challenging in other ways. Jesse Helms, later a US senator and national conservative leader, became an executive at Capitol Broadcasting in 1960 and delivered news editorials railing against communism, liberalism, and civil rights. As program manager in the late-1960s, Helms was Lewis's boss.³⁵Jesse Helms, Here's Where I Stand (New York, Random House, 2005), 44–51; Ernest Furgurson, Hard Right: The Rise of Jesse Helms (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 69–91; William Link, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008), 64–98. WRAL, however, offered Teenage Frolics signal strength and stability, and Lewis's success at attracting advertisers and navigating station politics kept the program on the air for twenty-five years.

In a letter to potential advertisers, WRAL billed Teenage Frolics as "a live and lively dancing party featuring colored teenagers from high schools in the Channel 5 area." The station also included a coverage map of WRAL-TV, "which includes the most heavily populated Negro areas of the state of North Carolina (Approximately 450,000 Negroes)," and promised that "'The Teen-Age Frolic Show' affords a wonderful opportunity for firsthand consumer reaction to the sponsor's product."³⁶J.D. Lewis (WRAL), letter to Dick Snyder, May 24, 1963, Lewis Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, catalog number 5499, folder 139. Lewis secured Pepsi Cola, which sponsored Teenage Frolics as part of the "special markets" campaign to increase sales of the beverage among African Americans.³⁷On Pepsi marketing to black customers, see Stephanie Capparell, The Real Pepsi Challenge: How One Pioneering Company Broke Color Barriers in 1940s American Business (New York: Free Press, 2008). He served as a Pepsi public relations and sales representative for the Raleigh area from 1965 to 1968. Pepsi's sponsorship proved important to making of Teenage Frolics financially viable in the 1960s as it fought for airtime against more profitable national programming. A 1967 memo from Jesse Helms highlights the pressures Teenage Frolics faced from national broadcasts and mentions Pepsi's sponsorship of the show. "As per our conversation of yesterday, it is going to be necessary that we make some adjustment in our Saturday afternoon schedule this fall with respect to Teen-Age Frolics," Helms wrote to inform Lewis and other staff that the show would have to be shortened from its regular one hour broadcast time.

The abbreviated (15 minute) programs are necessary because of ABC's scheduling of American Bandstand from 12:30–1:30 p.m. each Saturday. To do otherwise would necessitate our preemption of a solid hour of commercial network programming, which I deem inadvisable. In the 15-minute programs, please leave two 60-second cutaways for the Pepsi-Cola commercials which I am advised are all that we have sold in Teen-Age Frolics anyhow."³⁸Jesse Helms, memo to Ray Reeve, July 6, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 139; Ray Reeve, memo to J.D. Lewis, July 7, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 139.

Despite Helms's backhanded reference, Pepsi's sponsorship offered Teenage Frolics a national brand sponsor, something neither The Mitch Thomas Show nor Teenarama possessed.

WRAL's mailing to advertisers also included a list of the schools and organizations that had visited the show. Mapping a partial list of the groups that visited the studio highlights how many young people wanted to appear on the show and participate in its creation of black youth music culture. When North Carolina began desegregation from 1969 to 1971, many black high schools were closed or were converted to elementary schools or junior highs. In 1970, for example, black students who attended W. E. B. DuBois High School were transferred to historically white Wake Forest High School and the DuBois High School building became Wake Forest-Rolesville Middle School.³⁹Barry Malone, "Before Brown: Cultural and Social Capital in a Rural Black School Community, W.E.B. Dubois High School, Wake Forest, North Carolina," The North Carolina Historical Review 85, no. 4 (October 2008): 443–444. "When black schools closed," historian David Cecelski writes, "their names, mascots, mottos, holidays, and traditions were sacrificed with them, while students were transferred to historically white schools that retained those markers of cultural and racial identity."⁴⁰David Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 9. Teenage Frolics offered a black cultural space that bridged this period between segregated and integrated schools.

Letters from viewers and aspiring musicians to Lewis and WRAL attest that many teenagers and performers wanted to appear on Teenage Frolics. "I watch your show every Saturday and enjoy it very much," one viewer wrote. "Your records are up to date and your show is very much for teenagers. I notice everybody that come are in groups. . . . I would like to come with 6 or 7 others, and be a part of your show. I would appreciate your information by telling me if we can come and when we can come. Please rush your information."⁴¹Susan Jordan, letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), n.d. [ca. 1966-67], Lewis Family Papers, folder 140. A letter to "John D." from an adult chaperone suggests that Lewis was a well-known and approachable local television personality, "I came to your house two Sundays ago to see you. I asked your daughter to tell you to call me, please. . . . My plan is to bring a group of 45 or 50 children . . . on Saturday, May 14^th. My question is—may they appear on your 'Dance Party'?"⁴²Hazel Jordan, letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), May 8, 1966, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140. Fans also felt free to criticize the format of Teenage Frolics. One particularly opinionated "Frolic Fan" wrote, "I am very concerned with your show. Once you really had a rocking roll show up here. But now it doesn't interest anyone." This viewer offered Lewis several suggestions for how to improve the show, including, "You need more records. New records come out every day and you play old ones."⁴³"Frolic Fan," letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), n.d. [ca. 1966-67], Lewis Family Papers, folder 140. Another letter complained that a local band, Irving Fuller and the Corvettes, appeared too often on the show, "Many of the people around Durham and elsewhere are bored of listening to the Corvettes. It seems as if you never play records anymore. Most people listening to a dance program would rather hear the latest records."⁴⁴Anonymous ("102 Pilot St.), letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), June 10, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140.

In addition to viewer letters, Lewis received mail from local music groups that watched and wanted to appear on the show. Groups like Donald and the Hitchhikers, Tiny and the Tinniettes, Little Joe and the Diamonds, Cobra and the Fabulous Entertainers, and the Dacels saw Teenage Frolics as a way to perform for other black teenagers and become known beyond their high schools and neighborhoods. The Superiors, a group of six fourteen to sixteen-year-olds from Smithfield, North Carolina, expressed dreams of auditioning for Motown and asked, "could we sort of take an inch of your show to sing" to "show North Carolina they will be greatly represented."⁴⁵Donald Hodge, letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), June 21, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; Guadalupe Hudson, letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), June 24, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; Daniel Jackson, letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), May 29, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140; "Nero, the Mad," letter to J.D. Lewis (WRAL), June 24, 1967, Lewis Family Papers, folder 140, July 22, 1967; Gwendolyn Gilmore, J.D. Lewis (WRAL), n.d. [ca. 1967], Lewis Family Papers, folder 140.

As television production became increasingly centralized in Los Angeles in the 1960s, Teenage Frolics was part of the everyday life of black teenagers in the Raleigh area. In this way, Teenage Frolics served as what scholar and musician Guthrie Ramsey calls a "community theater." Ramsey describes "community theaters" as "sites of cultural memory" that "include but are not limited to cinema, family narratives and histories, the church, the social dance, the nightclub, the skating rink, and even literature."⁴⁶Guthrie Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 4. From this perspective, localism was a virtue for Teenage Frolics rather than a detriment, because it offered young people a community connection that was not possible with national television. Sisters Gwendolyn and Lena Horton, for example, regularly walked from the Walnut Terrace neighborhood to appear on the show. Gwendolyn Horton recalled, "We would practice all week so we'd be ready on Saturday," while Lena Horton noted, "just to get out there, you thought you were something that could be shown on TV."⁴⁷Cash Michaels, "Memories of Teenage Frolics," The Carolinian, December 4, 1997. Comparing the show to Soul Train in 1997, The Carolinian, a Raleigh-based African-American newspaper, commented that Teenage Frolics "gave the Hollywood production a run for its money in these parts."⁴⁸Ibid. Soul Train and American Bandstand attracted nationally known performers, but on Teenage Frolics, teenagers participated in the show's creation and saw their neighbors, classmates, friends, and family do the same.

Teenarama Dance Party

A WOOK-TV advertisement in the 1965 Broadcasting Yearbook highlights the promise and precarity of the station that broadcast Teenarama Dance Party. The advertisement billed WOOK-TV as "America's First Negro Oriented TV Station" broadcasting "To & For Washington, D.C.'s 57% Negro population." While the advertisement used large, bold font to tout the city's majority African American population to potential advertisers, smaller letters tried to put a positive spin on the station's limitations, "281,000 UHF sets in operation in WOOK area as of Oct. 1, 1964."⁴⁹"WOOK-TV," 1965 Broadcasting Yearbook, A–10. Whereas all television sets could pick up VHF stations, which carried major network programming, UHF (ultra high frequency) stations required viewers to have special UHF tuners. This meant buying additional hardware to receive the channels, or, after Congress passed the All-Channels Receiver Act in 1962, buying a newer television set.⁵⁰Christopher Sterling and John Michael Kittross, Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting, Third Edition (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 255–256, 351–352, 383, 415–416. Both of these options were cost prohibitive for many of the African American viewers WOOK hoped to reach. Teenarama Dance Party received top billing in this advertisement and ultimately the show's fortunes would rise and fall with WOOK's.

Teenarama host Bob King came to WOOK in 1956 from WRAP radio in his hometown of Norfolk, Virginia, where he hosted an R&B show.⁵¹James Lee, "He Plays Teens Picks," Washington Star, [n.d.] ca. 1963. Looking back on his earlier radio career, King recalled, "In those days what I was playing was called 'race music.' It was a little more raucous. Then people like Presley came along and began to change it . . . In Norfolk in 1951 and 1952, they began calling it rhythm and blues. The hillbilly influence began creeping into it and the music became what we call rock and roll . . . The distinction, which may be a fine one, is the style of the singer and the background of a record. A lot of rock and roll today is bordering on what is called 'popular music.'"⁵²Ibid. King went on to say that he considered Teenarama and his radio show to be "rhythm and blues" programs, and R&B artists like James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Walter Jackson, and Chuck Jackson all performed on Teenarama. For these and other artists who played at Washington's historically black Howard Theater, Teenarama offered an additional opportunity to perform and promote their music while they were in the city.

While performers, record companies, and music fans welcomed Teenarama's promotion of R&B, WOOK's music programing drew criticism from Washington's black press and the city's black leaders. One editorial in the Washington Afro-American complained that WOOK-radio was "monotonous" because it played "rock 'n roll 17 hours a day," and described "'Colored' radio" as having "dedicated itself to a low-mentality level of programming which dispenses musical slop to remind colored people that's all they want to hear."⁵³"WOOK-TV's Coloring Book," Washington Afro-American, February 16, 1963; "WOOK's Insult to Our Race," Washington Afro-American, February 23, 1963. Another editorial argued that WOOK-TV insults "the colored race's intelligence by advertising itself as nothing but a station programming plain ol' music and dancing. As colored people, we've been plagued with that image ever since we were freed from slavery. WOOK-TV only perpetuates this image."⁵⁴"Voice of the People: In Defense of WOOK-TV," Washington Afro-American, February 23, 1963. Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chairman Julies Hobson also expressed concern, saying, "I object to foot tapping, dancing, screaming and shouting." Sterling Tucker, director of the Washington branch of the Urban League, worried that WOOK's focus on the "Negro market" was out of step with civil rights efforts, "You don't go along the road of segregation to achieve integration."⁵⁵"WOOK Says it Isn't Just One-Color TV," Washington Star, February 11, 1963. These critiques reflected differences in age and class between the readership of the Afro-American and potential viewers and listeners of WOOK-TV and WOOK-radio.⁵⁶John Henry Murphy, Sr. started publishing the Afro-American newspaper in Baltimore in 1892. By 1960, under the control of Carl Murphy, the Afro-American published editions across the Mid-Atlantic States. The Afro-American papers cultivated an older and more middle class black audience than the viewers and listeners WOOK-TV and WOOK-radio targeted. At the same time, the critics expressed concern that the station's management and white president, Richard Eaton, would not attend to community interests and concerns beyond musical entertainment. For his part, Eaton argued on the eve of the station's first broadcast, "WOOK-TV will be a place where young Negroes can develop their talents and the problems of the Negro [will be] vividly displayed. We hope to show interracial activities which are harmonious. We do not intend to assume a controversial role."⁵⁷"Nation's First Minority Group TV Station to Broadcast Today," Chicago Defender, February 11, 1963.

WOOK-TV never assumed a leadership role with regards to the main political issues of its era, but Teenarama showcased black youth culture for Washington viewers. Chuck Jackson, an R&B artist who appeared on the show several times, described Teenarama's importance, "Before this, with some kids, no one has given them a sense of being someone, a sense of independence. All kids are creative, but we don't let them express it . . . These kids are typical of all the kids who are given something to do, some responsibility."⁵⁸Nan Randall, "Rocking and Rolling Road to Respectability," Washington Post, July 4, 1965. In an interview with filmmaker Beverly Lindsay-Johnson, who made an important documentary on the show, Teenarama regular Reginald "Lucky" Luckett recalled, "One of the key things about the program was that it got the [teens] involved. If you stood around the cameramen, they would show you how to operate the cameras. I became more fascinated with the operation than the program." Another regular, William Clemmons recalled, "We couldn't go on The Milt Grant Show on a regular basis. We couldn't go on Shindig on a regular basis. We couldn't go on American Bandstand on a regular basis. We had Teenarama, which was ours."⁵⁹"Dance Party (The Teenarama Story), Research Narrative," Box 2, Kendall Production Records, Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum. As Clemmons suggests, Teenarama afforded a level of television visibility for black teenagers and black music that was not found on national programs.

One of the challenges with analyzing The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama is that no visual traces of the shows are known to exist. Most early television shows were recorded over or discarded because storage was too expensive. In her documentary on Teenarama Beverly Lindsay-Johnson dealt with this lack of footage by recruiting contemporary Washington teenagers, teaching them the locally distinct "hand dance" of the era, and having them reenact the dances. "We had eight weeks to get these kids taught," Lindsay-Johnson remembered, "and when it came time to shoot the reenactments I wasn't sure they got it." She recalled that this changed when they got period clothing, "It was a community effort, there was a guy who used to dance on Teenarama who worked at the Salvation Army and he said, 'come in and get anything you want'…when the kids had the clothes on…the kids got it, I knew they had it."⁶⁰Beverly Lindsay-Johnson, interview with author, January 8, 2013. This story and the black and white reenactments in Lindsay-Johnson's film speak both to the creativity that historians of television must employ and to the imprint Teenarama made on the black population in Washington, DC.

The Milt Grant Show

As WOOK-TV prepared to come on the air in 1963, the Afro-American newspaper received a letter from Rev. Clarence Burton Jr., defending the station and raising a question about the teen dance show that predated Teenarama. "Who can tell," Burton offered, "from the working of the station maybe we can increase our colored stardom. There have been many cases where our leaders needed to make outcries such as Milt Grant's TV dance program, it seems to me that that was segregation."⁶¹"Voice of the People: In Defense of WOOK-TV," Washington Afro-American, February 23, 1963. As Burton suggests, during its five years The Milt Grant Show (1956–1961) was an officially segregated program. The show blocked black teens from the studio, though complaints from black viewers eventually led to one show per week featuring a black studio audience (so-called "Black Tuesday"). Despite its ban on black teenagers, the show regularly featured black R&B performers who were in town to perform at the Howard Theater. The Milt Grant Show is particularly interesting for how it sought to bring black music performances to television viewers while maintaining a segregated studio audience that would appeal to sponsors.

Only one kinescope of The Milt Grant Show is known to exist, but it features two separate performances by R&B performers—one by the duo Johnnie and Joe (Johnnie Lee Richardson and Joe Walker), and the other by LaVern Baker—that help explain how the show sought to manage the differences between black performers and white audience members. In each clip, the teenagers dance as the singers lip sync to recordings of their songs, as was the common practice in this era. The cameras shift between a medium shot of the artists and a wide shot of couples dancing, before using a picture-in-picture production technique that presented the shot of the artists in a box overlaying the shot of the teenagers dancing. A performance later in the show by white singer Jeri Renay did not use this technique. The resulting image nicely illustrates the tensions surrounding televising black music to white audiences. Broadcasting black musical performers on television was more challenging than radio, because television made the performers' bodies visible, and on dance shows like these, put their bodies in close proximity to those of dozens of teenagers. Alan Freed's Big Beat television show, for example, was cancelled in August 1957 after affiliated stations complained about black teenage singer Frankie Lymon dancing with a white teenage girl. A year later, an American Bandstand producer told the New York Post that this incident contributed to American Bandstand's segregation.⁶²John Jackson, Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll (New York: Shirmer Trade Books, 2000), 168–169; Jackson, American Bandstand: Dick Clark and the Making of a Rock 'n' Roll Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 56. The Milt Grant Show clips from May 1957 predate the Freed-Lymon controversy, but the show faced similar concerns. Grant needed to be able to feature black performers in a way that was safe for the consuming pleasure of the white studio and television audiences and the sponsors that were eager to reach them. With black performers only a few feet away from the white teenage dancers in the studio, the picture-in-picture technique demarcated the racial boundary between performers and audiences and offered one strategy for televising black musicians while maintaining racial segregation.

Despite the racial segregation of the studio audience, The Milt Grant Show offered black performers like LaVern Baker valuable exposure to white consumers. In the prior three years, Baker had mixed experiences with crossing over from the R&B charts to the pop chart. Her songs "Tweedle Dee" and "Jim Dandy" both reached the top twenty of the pop chart, but white singer Georgia Gibbs's cover of "Tweedle Dee" topped the pop chart and outsold Baker's version.⁶³Arnold Shaw, Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 376. Baker's contemporary Ruth Brown explained, "I wasn't so upset about other singers copying my songs because that was their privilege, and they had to pay the writers of the song. But what did hurt me was the fact that I had originated the song, and I never got the opportunities to be in the top television shows and the talk shows. I didn't get the exposure. And the other people were copying the style, the whole idea."⁶⁴Quoted in Ward, Just My Soul Responding, 48. Baker, who appeared on The Milt Grant Show while she was in town to play the Howard Theater, performed "Jim Dandy Got Married" and "Play the Game of Love" on this episode. Even if The Milt Grant Show carefully managed the positioning of black singers and white dancers, television viewers in the greater Washington area saw Baker perform and this exposure was one step towards establishing her as a crossover star in the late-1950s and early-1960s.

The Milt Grant Show dedicated almost every minute to selling products, and Grant, as this message to potential sponsors makes clear, was a compelling and unabashed salesman. While WTTG-TV lacked a network affiliation, Grant proved skilled at recruiting and serving sponsors.⁶⁵WTTG-TV was was founded as a DuMont station and DuMont ended network operations in 1956. "Grant provides an all-out sponsor and agency service," Billboard reported in 1961. "He attends sales meetings, store openings and maintains close identification with his sponsors' products off the air as well as on."⁶⁶"TV Jockey Profile: The Milt Grant Show," Billboard, February 6, 1961, 43. He promised potential sponsors that for an hour every afternoon WTTG-TV's studio in the Raleigh Hotel in downtown Washington would be a nexus for selling products to area teenagers. From paid advertisements for consumer goods to promotions of records and musical guests, also often paid for by record promoters, The Milt Grant Show presented its viewers with a host of messages. The show urged teenagers to drink Pepsi, eat at Tops' Drive-Inn, listen to Motorola portable radios, and buy the newest records at the Music Box record store. This was an extraordinarily high level of promotional activity, even by the standards of commercial television. Music was the glue that held together a carnival of consumption.

Sponsors that advertised on The Milt Grant Show bought interaction between their products and the show's teenagers. For example, in a 1957 episode the show's teens finished dancing to The Everly Brothers' "Bye Bye Love" and the camera focused on Grant in front of a table with dozens of bottles of Pepsi. After Grant took a big drink of the soda and delivered the sales pitch ("Never too heavy, never too sweet, always just right"), he asked two teenagers to help hand out bottles of the sponsor's drink to the dancers. As Grant introduced The Four Aces' "I Just Don't Know," he exited the scene, the camera pulled back to focus on teens who flocked to pick up their free Pepsi. The teens held and drank their sodas while dancing, keeping the sponsor's product in the picture throughout the song. Some teens were still holding their bottles when Grant started the next advertisement for Motorola portable radios. Here again, the advertisement incorporated the studio audience, with one young woman holding the radio while Grant praised its features. These interpolated commercials, common in radio and television in this era, offered sponsors daily visual evidence of teenagers' eagerness to consume and encouraged The Milt Grant Show's viewers to participate in the same rituals of consumption.

Conclusion

From one perspective, these televised teen dance shows were commercialized diversions during an era of profound changes in the racial dynamics of the South. From another, however, these shows were spaces that celebrated the creative potential and everyday lives of black youth. To show how these perspectives are intertwined I'll conclude with a brief discussion of a dance show that started broadcasting at a pivotal time and from a pivotal place in the history of civil rights. Steve's Show debuted in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the spring of 1957, months before the integration crisis at Central High School drew national attention. Examining Little Rock, political theorist Danielle Allen writes, "Nineteen fifty-seven forced citizens to confront the nature of their citizenship—that is, the basic habits of interaction in public spaces—and many were shamed into desiring a new order."⁶⁷Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5. Allen argues that images, like Will Counts's iconic photograph of black student, Elizabeth Eckford, surrounded by a white mob and being cursed by white student Hazel Bryan, forced some white Americans to revaluate their "habits of citizenship."

Changes to the structure of public life took place slowly. Televised teen dance shows offer an example of how "basic habits of interaction in public spaces" did not change dramatically in 1957. Just over one mile from Central High School, Steve's Show broadcast from the KTHV-TV studios. While Little Rock's school desegregation crisis led print and television news across the country in the fall of 1957, Arkansas viewers could tune in every afternoon to watch white teenagers dance on the still-segregated Steve's Show. Like other white teens that protested the desegregation of Central High, Hazel Bryan danced regularly on Steve's Show. After the widely circulated photograph made her a local celebrity she attended the show with a bodyguard.⁶⁸David Margolick, Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 44, 290. Steve's Show was a highly visible regional space that asserted a racially segregated public culture and continued to do so until it went off the air in 1961. And Steve's Show was not unique: Dick Reid's Record Hop in Charleston, West Virginia; Ginny Pace's Saturday Hop in Houston, Texas; John Dixon's Dixon on Disc in Mobile, Alabama; Bill Sanders's show in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Dewey Phillips's Pop Shop in Memphis, Tennessee; and Chuck Allen's Teen Tempo in Jackson, Mississippi were all segregated dance shows. Like The Milt Grant Show, Baltimore's Buddy Deane Show, the inspiration for John Waters's Hairspray film and the later Broadway musical and Hollywood film, was officially segregated and only allowed black teens to enter the studio on specific days. Nationally, American Bandstand blocked black teens from entering the studio during its years in Philadelphia, despite host Dick Clark's claims to the contrary. Every weekday afternoon, in each of these broadcast markets, these shows presented images of exclusively white teenagers.

In his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to what it meant for young black people to be excluded from these sorts of entertainment spaces. In a long list of reasons why "we find it difficult to wait," King includes, "when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky…then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait." King's mention of "Funtown" is preceded by references to lynch mobs, police brutality and the "airtight cage of poverty," and followed by references to hotel segregation and racial slurs. While it is tempting to see "Funtown" as somehow less important than these issues, to do so is a mistake. The "Funtown" reference is powerful because it captures one of the ways that Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy were most meaningful to children and teenagers. For many young people being blocked from amusements parks, swimming pools, and skating rinks would be their first exposure to what King calls the feeling of "forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness.'"⁶⁹Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963.

The prevalence of racial segregation in recreational spaces and on white teen dance shows throws the importance of The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama into sharp relief. If white teen shows sought to shore up the supremacy of whiteness in youth music culture, the black teen shows visualized black teens as equal participants in the production and consumption of music culture. In her study of the landmark black television show Soul!, that ran from 1968 to 1972, Gayle Wald argues that the show "created a television space where black people…could see, hear, and almost feel each other." Wald describes this as an "affective compact" that "complicates the clear division between production and consumption."⁷⁰Gayle Wald, It's Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 217, 72. While Soul! was more politically and aesthetically adventurous than The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama, these teen dance shows fostered a similar compact between their audiences and performers. Mitch Thomas, J. D. Lewis, and Bob King created televisual spaces that privileged black audiences and displayed the creative energies and talents of black youth. Years before Soul Train (1971–2006) brought black dance television to national audiences, The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama highlighted black music and dance styles.⁷¹Ericka Blount Danois, Love, Peace, and Soul: Behind the Scenes of America's Favorite Dance Show Soul Train: Classic Moments (Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2013); Nelson George, The Hippest Trip in America: Soul Train and the Evolution of Culture and Style (New York: William Morrow, 2014); Questlove, Soul Train: The Music, Dance, and Style of a Generation (New York: Harper Design, 2013). Unlike Soul Train, which moved from Chicago to Hollywood after one year, these local shows featured and appealed to black teens from Wilmington, Raleigh, and Washington, and as the opening clip from Seventeen suggests, they influenced American musical cultures in surprising ways.

Ultimately, these televised teen dance shows encourage us to expand the range of sounds and images we associate with black youth in the South. It takes nothing away from the young men and women who risked their lives to desegregate schools and lunch counters to recognize that thousands of teenagers found joy and value in dancing on television or watching their peers do the same. If the iconic civil rights images from cities like Little Rock, Greensboro, and Birmingham attest to the fact that young activists struggled to be treated as first-class citizens, The Mitch Thomas Show, Teenage Frolics, and Teenarama emphasized that black youth were worthy of being first-class consumers and teenagers.⁷²On the relationship between citizenship and consumption, see Lizbeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumptions in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); Robert Weems, Jr., Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Victoria Wolcott, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 2012). 

About the Author

Matthew Delmont is associate professor of history at Arizona State University and author of The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia (University of California Press, American Crossroads series, February 2012), and Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (University of California Press, American Crossroads series, forthcoming February 2016).  He is currently finishing a book titled Making Roots: How an Epic Book and Television Miniseries Made History and Why Roots Still Matters (under contract with University of California Press).

Review

Emmett Till continues to torment our imaginations. How could two (and almost certainly more) grown men, veterans, over six feet tall, see a fourteen year old kid as such a threat to "the southern way of life" that they tortured and killed him? How could a Mississippi court exonerate them? The story haunts us still, and more important, it haunted a whole generation of people, especially those who became activists in the Freedom Struggle.

Darryl Mace's In Remembrance of Emmett Till: Regional Stories and Media Responses to the Black Freedom Struggle is the latest installment in the growing shelf of books about the Till murder and its aftermath. (Truth in reviewing: I'm at work on a book about Till too.) Mace's book is by turns useful, clear, thoughtful, and frustrating.

Mace argues that the murder of this Chicago youth—who whistled at a white woman at a crossroads grocery store in Money, Mississippi, in August 1955 and was lynched for it—catalyzed men and women into an irresistible movement for change. He's right; so many people roughly of Till's age when he was murdered look back at his death and the acquittal of his killers as a formative moment in their lives, from Anne Moody to Muhammad Ali, from Stokely Carmichael to Congressman John Lewis. Mace is not the first to suggest this, but the point bears repeating.

In Remembrance of Emmett Till is structured around newspaper and magazine coverage of the murder, funeral, trial, and their aftermath. More precisely, Mace argues that there were significant differences in how print media covered the events based on section of the country—Midwest, Northeast, Southeast, and West Coast. He also gives plenty of space to African American journalism, sometimes folded into his geographical schema (the Chicago Defender is a midwestern publication, the California Eagle a western one), but sometimes, more appropriately, as a category of its own.

Mace's sectional differences are significant, but perhaps overblown. After all, few newspapers sent reporters to Mississippi. Most simply edited and reprinted wire service stories, then added a comment on the opinion page and a letter to the editor or two. So it is a little striking that Mace generalizes, for example, that "readers in Seattle and Denver were somewhat sympathetic to the Till family, while readers in San Francisco were largely disinterested in the Till case" (124). His footnotes cite one letter each from the sympathetic towns, none from the disinterested one. Or again, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published two very pointed letters to the editor after the "not guilty" verdict, which leads Mace to conclude, "Such letters made it clear that most people were tired of business as usual when it came to cases of racial violence" (105). From two letters?

Coverage of the Emmett Till trial in Jet, September 22, October 6, and October 13, 1955.

There are further problems with inferring sectional opinion from newsprint. First, as Mace's own evidence shows, the tone of newspaper coverage changed depending what part of the story was being covered. For example, northeastern print media largely ignored Till's murder, but once the trial began, gave harsh condemnation of the South and its people and institutions. Such subtlety often gets lost. Worse, Mace too easily picks up the moralistic tone of some editorialists' condemnations of the white South in which all are hopelessly benighted and racist. It is certainly true that even liberal editors like Greenville's Hodding Carter circled his wagon with the others against northerners' assaults on his adopted state, especially those coming from deeply segregated towns like Chicago and New York. But at his least cautious, Mace questions whether any sincere anger or regret about Till's murder could issue from an area of the country so steeped in racism.

What is so tragic about the Till story is not that southerners were uniformly hateful or at least indifferent. Outrage followed the initial reports of the murder. But outrage soon gave way to caution and sectional defensiveness. The tragedy of the story comes from the fact that people like Hodding Carter knew better, were truly horrified by the viciousness of the crime, but were not so horrified that they failed to defend Mississippi's honor. More important, they soon downplayed the viciousness of Till's killing to defend "the southern way of life," which is to say segregation. They loved justice, but when push came to shove, they loved segregation—or more precisely, they feared integration—more.

So Mace is right that Till's killing blurred nuances between liberals and conservatives. But that needs to be explained, not explained away. For example, Mace is so determined to show a thoroughly racist South that it is impossible for him to credit the prosecutors with anything but bad faith. He isn't wrong about the racism—read the trial transcript and it's clear that lead prosecutor Gerald Chatham couches his case in classic racial paternalism. But most participants, such as James Hicks who covered the trial for several African American newspapers, Murray Kempton of the New York Post, and even Emmett's mom Mamie Till-Mobley, praised the prosecutors. The attorneys were rushed (the trial took place three weeks after the murder), had inadequate resources, made mistakes, but clearly they wanted convictions, and wanted them badly. Why did they not ask for the death penalty? Because they knew that no white jury would send the defendants to their deaths. They argued the case with the very opposite of indifference, with unmistakable passion. The trial judge too, Curtis Swango, was mostly quite fair, according to contemporary accounts, black and white, northern and southern.

That fairness is part of the tragedy too. Good intentions were beside the point. Observing proper judicial forms didn't matter. Twelve white men simply would not convict someone of their ilk of murdering an African American, especially when most of the evidence came from blacks themselves. The Till trial was a classic example of institutional racism. Feelings of good will or fairness or paternal generosity were useless; the outcome was all but preordained in a political and legal system built up over generations.

There are other problems with In Remembrance of Emmett Till. Sometimes Mace is downright sloppy with details. For example he describes J. W. Milam shooting Emmett Till in the back of the head (133). Milam did shoot Till, but just above the ear, as Mace reveals elsewhere. Or, Mace describes Clenora Hudson-Weem's 1994 Emmett Till: Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement as the book that "resurrected" the study of the case (136), but he fails to mention (or even to list in his biography) Stephen J. Whitfield's 1988 book A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till.¹Cleonora Hudson-Weems, Emmett Till: Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement (Boston: Bedford, 1994); Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (New York: The Free Press, 1988). Mace also repeats Mamie Till-Mobley's belief that Emmett didn't whistle at Carolyn Bryant (148). Emmett stuttered, and whistling was a trick he sometimes used to break through his impediment. But those who were in the store, Till's cousins, have been clear and consistent through the years that what they heard was a wolf-whistle.

Sometimes the problems with In Remembrance of Emmett Till go beyond details. For example, two books preceded Mace's on the subject of newspaper coverage: Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff's Pulitzer Prize winning The Race Beat, and Davis W. Houck and Matthew A. Grindy's Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press.²Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Davis W. Houck and Matthew A. Grindy, Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008). Mace notes the former in passing and gives the latter no attention, even in his bibliography. This is important because both books explicate the vagaries of news reporting by race and place. Or again, Mace describes Carolyn Bryant's testimony before the court—Till, she said, asked her for a date, grabbed her hand, put his arm around her waist, used a word so obscene she couldn't repeat it, and finally let out his famous wolf-whistle. Mace of course is right that Bryant's claims were highly suspect, that even if everything she said was true it was no excuse for murder, and that most newspaper coverage was quite uncritical of her. But he ought to tell us too that the prosecutors vigorously objected to the jury hearing Carolyn Bryant, arguing that whatever took place in Money, Mississippi, on Wednesday had no legal bearing on a kidnapping and murder four days later. Judge Swango agreed, and he refused to let the jury hear her testimony. And that too didn't matter in the final verdict.

In Remembrance of Emmett Till adds to our knowledge of that terrible lynching and its aftermath. The author gives us fresh insight into the relationship between media, race, and the justice system. He reminds us just how important the Till murder and trial were for the future of the Freedom Struggle. If the book isn't always as precise as it might be, Mace still helps keep this story alive in all of its horror.

About the Author

Elliott J. Gorn is the Joseph Gagliano Professor of American Urban History at Loyola University Chicago. His books and articles embrace multiple aspects of urban and American culture, particularly the history of various social groups in American cities since 1800.

In the spring of 1974, a dozen white and African American women and their daughters gathered outside the office of the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA) in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina.¹The union in 1974 was the Textile Workers Union of America, which merged with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union in 1976 to form the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union of America (ACTWU). As the cameras of Gloria Steinem's PBS series Woman Alive! rolled, the girls, wearing handmade cheerleading uniforms with "TWUA" emblazoned across the front, chanted, "You can rock us, you sock us, but you can't knock us flat! Tell me Mr. Stevens, can you top that?" Their mothers tried to ignore the camera crew. They had created the cheerleading squad the previous year to support unionizing the seven J. P. Stevens plants in Roanoke Rapids, but they were unaccustomed to this kind of attention.

Steinem's episode featured Crystal Lee Sutton.²Joan Shigekawa, Woman Alive! (June 19, 1974; Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas: KERA-TV), Documentary. Accessed in Crystal Lee Sutton's personal papers 986.87, an unprocessed collection housed at Alamance Community College, Graham, North Carolina. For more information about the history and content of the Woman Alive! series, see Woman Alive! produced by KERA-TV Dallas/Fort Worth and WNET/13 New York; made possible by a grant from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting; exective producer, Joan Shigekawa: A Finding Aid, MC 421; Vt-30, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliff College. On May 30, 1973, Stevens had fired Sutton for insubordination after she insisted on copying an anti-union letter posted on the company bulletin board. Sutton then climbed atop a shop floor table and raised a piece of cardboard with "UNION" scrawled on it. She spent the night in jail. Steinem read about Sutton's confrontation with Stevens managers and local police in a New York Times article on the TWUA's organizing drive and wanted to include her in Woman Alive!—an early example of the media coverage and outside support the union received in its six-year struggle with the J. P. Stevens corporation. While the episode called attention to Sutton, it also showed many other mill women front and center.

A bold, multi-faceted effort, the campaign to unionize J. P. Stevens included boycotts, community-based organizing, and publicity campaigns against corporate intransigence and irresponsibility. The union's deployment of these tactics reached many audiences and motivated allies within and beyond the labor movement. This essay contextualizes the mill women's experiences, illuminating the crucial role they played in capturing attention, garnering support, and motivating action from allies. Personal narratives of white and African American women workers tapped into concerns with workplace justice fostered by the women's and civil rights movements. Aware of the limits of Stevens unionization, I examine what women gave to the effort and the distinct forms their activism took.

The Stevens Campaign and the Southern Textile Industry

From the 1920s through the 1960s, textile unionists labored to organize mill workers in the southern Piedmont, a region stretching from north Georgia and central Alabama through the middle of the Carolinas and into southern Virginia. Flanked on the west by the Appalachian Mountains and to the east by the Atlantic coastal plain, the Piedmont was a stronghold of textile and apparel manufacturing, which provided the main source of industrial jobs for working-class white families. From the 1920s through the 1950s, white women comprised at least one-third of the textile labor force; in 1929, their numbers in North Carolina peaked at 44.6 percent. By 1960, the United States textile labor force was overwhelmingly white, southern, and female. More than three-fourths of all textile manufacturing in the United States happened in the southern Piedmont, where 45 percent of all textile workers were female. African Americans, barred from all but the least-skilled and lowest-paid jobs in the mills, accounted for less than 5 percent of the work force. Wages in southern textile mills were always lower than the national average for factory workers, with the exception of the 1950s, when average wages in the southern mills equaled those in the North. About 5 percent of Piedmont mill workers belonged to a union in the 1960s, compared to 37 to 46 percent in New England and Mid-Atlantic states. Despite low wages and harsh working conditions, most workers' standard of living improved when they traded agricultural and domestic work for manufacturing.³Timothy J. Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 164–165; Timothy J. Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!: The J. P. Stevens Campaign and the Struggle to Organize the South, 1963–80 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 10–11, 22–24; Linda Frankel, "Southern Textile Women: Generations of Survival and Struggle," in My Troubles Are Going to Have Trouble with Me: Everyday Trials and Triumphs of Women Workers, eds. Karen Brodkin Sacks and Dorothy Remy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 41–42; Nancy MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 79.

Postwar growth and industrial diversification shrank the textile labor force in the 1950s and 1960s. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act enabled black workers to demand more and better jobs in the mills. African Americans organized through the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) "TEAM" project (Textiles: Employment and Advancement for Minorities). They were more likely than white workers to believe unionization was necessary for wage justice and equal opportunity.⁴Minchin, Don't Sleep With Stevens!, 23–24; MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough, 78–79, 84. Sensing an opportunity in the 1960s, the TWUA sent waves of organizers into the J. P. Stevens mills, the second-largest textile corporation in the United States with more than thirty thousand workers in some seventy mills in Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas. Stevens proved an unrelenting opponent. Between 1963 and 1973, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found Stevens guilty of violating labor laws in twenty-one of twenty-two cases. Stevens paid $1.3 million in back wages to nearly three hundred workers illegally discharged for union support. In 1974, workers in Stevens's seven Roanoke Rapids plants voted for union representation, a stunning achievement for the interracial group of workers who led the organizing drive. As Stevens fought a contract for the next six years, the Roanoke Rapids struggle transformed from a local conflict to a national campaign. The election victory united labor, civil rights, and women's rights activists behind the newly merged textile and clothing workers' union and its "Don't Sleep with Stevens" boycott.⁵Minchin, Don't Sleep With Stevens!, 27; Timothy J. Minchin, "‘Don't Sleep with Stevens!': The J. P. Stevens Boycott and Social Activism in the 1970s," Journal of American Studies 39, no. 3 (2005): 512.

Cover of Norma Rae, directed by Martin Rich, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1979. The 2001 DVD re-release cover of Norma Rae features Sally Field's title character in the film's most famous moment.

In 1979, Hollywood told a fictionalized version of the Stevens campaign in the Academy Award–winning Norma Rae. Scriptwriters framed the movie around Sutton's life story, as told to journalist Henry Leifermann in a 1973 New York Times Magazine article and 1975 book, Crystal Lee, A Woman of Inheritance.⁶Norma Rae, directed by Martin Ritt (1979; Hollywood: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2001), DVD; Henry Leifermann, "The Unions Are Coming: Trouble in the South's First Industry," New York Times Magazine, August 5, 1973, sec. 6, 10–11, 25–26. Leifermann later published a book based on his interviews with Sutton entitled Crystal Lee, A Woman of Inheritance (New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1975). Sutton revealed her past marital infidelity and that she had never married her second son's father. She feared that anti-union people in town who knew or suspected these things about her would use her secrets to silence her. Sutton later reflected that the New York Times Magazine article freed her from the small town rumor mill because "nobody will ever have anything to hold over me no more."⁷Sutton, quoted in Victoria Byerly, Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1986), 212. Sutton's unabashed revelations about her checkered past and her unrepentant sexuality caused trouble for her with pro- and anti-union people. "Rumor has got back to me," she recalled, "that people are saying that it's a bunch of whores standing out getting people to join the union." While she was leafleting outside of the mills between shifts, an older white woman refused to take a union card, saying to her, "I been wanting to meet you. I sure do feel sorry for you because of any woman that has little enough respect for herself to [reveal sexual indiscretions in a newspaper article]."⁸Shikegawa, Woman Alive!, Documentary. In 1974, a dozen pro-union workers wrote to Harold McIver, regional director of the organizing drive, complaining that Sutton exerted too much influence over Eli Zivkovich, the organizer in Roanoke Rapids. One letter insinuated that Sutton and Zivkovich were having an affair: "[Crystal] has got a key to the office. She has got a key to Eli's motel room. So why shouldn't people be talking?"⁹Letters to Harold McIver from Roanoke Rapids workers, October 29 and 30, 1974, Box 5, Folder "JPS-Roanoke rapids, N.C., General Information and Correspondence," Textile Workers Union of America records, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin, Collection 396. (Hereafter cited as TWUA records, WHS, 396.) To the chagrin of Sutton and union leaders, Norma Rae relied heavily on these themes of sexuality, rumor, and internal tensions. But the movie was enormously popular and drew positive attention to the union's Stevens campaign. Sutton toured the country as "the real Norma Rae" in support of the boycott of Stevens's products, always stressing that there were many Norma Raes.

A scene from Norma Rae (1979) illustrating the tension between Norma Rae, a worker at a textile mill, and Reuben Warshowsky, a union organizer. In this scene, Norma Rae's attempt to copy the company's racially inflammatory anti-union letter is mostly faithful to Sutton's biography and official records. The sexually-charged argument between Norma and Reuben, however, was fabricated to demonstrate the unconsumated attraction between the two that the filmmakers wanted in the story. Reuben pushes Norma to prove her political commitment and personal investment in the union campaign, then storms out to relieve the tension by having sex with any woman in town but Norma.

Under pressure from leaders of northern and southern progressive churches and religious groups, women's groups, consumers, and stockholders, Stevens agreed to negotiate contracts in good faith at its mills in Roanoke Rapids and Montgomery, Alabama, the two sites where the union had won elections but did not have contracts. In return, the union agreed to end its boycott and corporate campaign. The 1980 settlement covered only about 12 percent of Stevens workers, but compared to totally nonunion textile corporations, such as Burlington and Cannon, this victory seemed extraordinary. Although national textile employment fell 26 percent between 1973 and 1983, pro-union mill workers in 1980 did not imagine that this victory marked the beginning of the end of their struggle with a failing domestic industry.¹⁰Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!, 166–168,177; John Gaventa and Barbara Ellen Smith, "The Deindustrialization of the Textile South: A Case Study," in Hanging by a Thread: Social Change in Southern Textiles, eds. Jeffrey Leiter, Michael D. Schulman, and Phillip J. Wood (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1991), 139–162. For more on the decline of textile manufacturing in the United States and the effects of globalization on textile and apparel industries, see Grace I. Kunz and Myrna B. Garner, Going Global: The Textile and Apparel Industry (New York: Fairchild, 2007); Mary E. Frederickson, Looking South: Race, Gender, and the Transformation of Labor from Reconstruction to Globalization (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011); and Timothy J. Minchin, "Shutdowns in the Sun Belt: The Decline of the Textile and Apparel Industry and Deindustrialization in the South," in Life and Labor in the New New South, ed. Robert H. Zieger (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012). The Stevens campaign built new alliances among feminists, civil rights, and labor advocates and brought publicity to the union's southern effort. Verdicts in the plaintiffs' favor were rolling in from class action discrimination lawsuits filed by African American and women workers against textile corporations. In Roanoke Rapids, Sutton's sister Syretha Medlin evoked the sentiment of her fellow pro-union workers when she said, "This is just wonderful. It's like a whole new life."¹¹Medlin quoted in Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!, 170. On verdicts in class-action discrimination lawsuits, see MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough, 86–87.

Since the 1980s, several labor historians have written about Norma Rae and the Stevens campaign. Timothy Minchin's monograph explores the boycott and corporate campaign from the union's perspective and argues that J. P. Stevens set a precedent for aggressive anti-union attacks in the 1980s. Essays by James Hodges and Robert Zieger describe Crystal Lee Sutton's participation in the unionization effort, critique Norma Rae's poetic license, and celebrate her as a working-class heroine.¹² Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!; James A. Hodges, "The Real Norma Rae," in Southern Labor in Transition, 1940–1995, ed. Robert H. Zieger (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 251–272. See also James A. Hodges, "J. P. Stevens and the Union: Struggle for the South," in Race, Class, and Community in Southern Labor History, eds. Gary M. Fink and Merl E. Reed (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), 53–64; Jefferson Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010). In these historians' writings, however, the task of separating fact from fiction obscures the interplay between politics and fantasy, sex and race, and labor and feminism at work in the 1970s. The Stevens campaign reveals how important working-class women's labor feminism and considerations of gender and sexuality were to organizing the textile and apparel industries.¹³My use of gender and sexuality to analyze the roles of women in labor organizing and economic justice campaigns is greatly influenced by the following scholarship: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Disorderly Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South," The Journal of American History 73, no. 2 (1986): 354–382; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "Public Eyes, Private Women: Images of Class and Sex in the Urban South, Atlanta, Georgia, 1913–1915," in Work Engendered: Toward A New History of American Labor, ed. Ava Baron (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 216–242; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher B. Daly, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Mary E. Frederickson, "Heroines and Girl Strikers: Gender Issues and Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century American South," in Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century South, ed. Robert H. Zieger (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press 1991), 84–112; Mary E. Frederickson, "I Know Which Side I'm On: Southern Women in the Labor Movement in the Twentieth Century," in Women, Work, and Protest, ed. Ruth Milkman (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 156–180; Nancy MacLean, "Redesigning Dixie with Affirmative Action: Race, Gender, and the Desegregation of the Southern Textile Mill World," in Gender and the Southern Body Politic, ed., Nancy Bercaw (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 161–191; Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Nancy Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1933–1975 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Alice Kessler-Harris, Gendering Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990), see especially Chapter 3, "Work, Family, and Black Women's Oppression"; Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar's Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005).

Sick for Justice

On August 28, 1974 in Roanoke Rapids, 3,133 workers streamed through the polling stations in the seven Stevens plants in an NLRB election to determine if the TWUA would represent them. Maurine Hedgepeth, a middle-aged weaver who lost her job in the 1960s because she supported the union, observed the ballot counting that evening in the meeting room in front of the Rosemary mill. The union won by 237 votes. For organizers and union leaders, the success in Roanoke Rapids seemed to signal a turning point: black and white workers could unite against a company as aggressively anti-union as Stevens. "Roanoke Rapids is everywhere," proclaimed North Carolina civil rights activist Reverend W. W. Finlator. Organizer Michael Spzak, who had worked in Greenville, South Carolina, recalls that among labor organizers in the South in the 1970s, "everything was Roanoke Rapids."¹⁴ Statement of W. W. Finlator, August 26, 1977, Box 2363, Folder 1, North Carolina State AFL-CIO records, 1945–1981, Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Atlanta, Georgia, Collection L1981-20. (Hereafter cited as "NC State AFL-CIO records, GSU Library.") Michael Spzak, recorded interview with the author, March 23, 2011, in author's possession. (Hereafter, cited as "Spzak interview.")

It soon became clear, as one NLRB judge noted, that J. P. Stevens "approached [contract] negotiations with all the tractability and openmindedness of Sherman at the outskirts of Atlanta."¹⁵Mimi Conway, Rise Gonna Rise: A Portrait of Southern Textile Workers (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979), 11. The quotation from the NLRB judge also appears in Hodges, "J. P. Stevens and the Union," 59. Two years after the euphoria of Roanoke Rapids, the workers still had no contract, and Stevens's persistent labor law violations mired the TWUA in legal battles that siphoned resources away from the organizing. In 1976, the TWUA and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACWA) merged to create the Amalgamated Textile and Clothing Workers Union of America (ACTWU, pronounced "Act Two"). Inspired by the ACWA's successful boycott against the Farah Manufacturing Company in Texas, ACTWU undertook "Don't Sleep with Stevens."¹⁶ For information on the Farah Strike, see Emily Honig, "Women at Farah Revisited: Political Mobilization and Its Aftermath among Chicana Workers in El Paso, Texas, 1972–1992," Feminist Studies 22, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 425–452. ACTWU staffer Ray Rogers started a corporate campaign aimed to pressure Stevens executives through stockholders and the financial and insurance companies that supported the company's operations.¹⁷Minchin, Don't Sleep With Stevens!, 111–112, 122–124. Hodges, "J. P. Stevens and the Union," 59–61.

Blonde Woman Working in a Textile Plant, Tennessee, circa late 1970s. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Southern Labor Archives, Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, Memphis-Jackson Joint Board Records, L1992_11_112.

Labor activists and pro-union politicians recognized that with the dramatic growth in economies of the southern states since the 1950s, the future of manufacturing workers in the United States was linked to the South. At the 1977 national labor law reform hearings held in the Roanoke Rapids Civic Center, Congressman Ted Weiss of New York told the Stevens workers there to testify that "the fight that you are waging here in North Carolina and the rest of the South is not just your fight for the workers down here." Wilbur Hobby, president of the North Carolina state AFL-CIO, spoke to the assault on trade unionism through decertification efforts. Civil rights and anti-poverty advocates understood the Stevens campaign to be the next step in keeping alive the 1960s vision of a more equitable and just society. Diana Wilson, a young, African American anti-poverty activist, told the House subcommittee, "People's concerns with union campaigns today are like what black Southerners experienced during the early civil rights days." In March 1977, Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King Jr., and Bayard Rustin, executive director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, marched with workers in a protest at Stevens's stockholders meeting in New York.¹⁸Conway, Rise Gonna Rise, 130–131, 148, 154–155.

ACTWU allies included politicians, such as US senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan; organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Institute for Southern Studies (ISS), and the National Football League Players Association; and civil rights groups and liberal religious associations. Southerners for Economic Justice (SEJ), formed in 1976 with financial support from ACTWU, became the backbone of the coalition. High profile figures from the 1960s Virginia Durr, Georgia senator Julian Bond, freedom rider John Lewis, Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, Rev. W. W. Finlator of the Pullen Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, and NAACP southern director Ruby Hurley. These veterans joined forces with young, relatively unknown social justice activists coming out of the 1960s New Left and student movements such as Bob Hall, a thirty-two-year-old Florida native and one of the founders of ISS, and Bill Finger, a thirty-year-old civil rights and labor activist from Mississippi who served as SEJ's first executive director. SEJ emphasized its background in the civil rights movement, origin in the South, and independence from ACTWU.¹⁹"ACTWU Press Release," December 1978, Box 25, Folder "IUD information," TWUA records, WHS, 396; Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!, 94; "Hearings Before the Committee on Education and Labor (Sub-committee on Labor-Management Relations), H.R. 8410, Labor Reform Act of 1977," August 9, 1977, Box 16, Folder "Misc. Legal Cases," TWUA records, WHS, 396.

SEJ sought to unite activists and organizations around the goal of economic justice. It portrayed the union's campaign as a human rights struggle pitting decent, hard-working women and men against an impersonal corporate giant with a record of discrimination and law-breaking that affronted Christian principles.²⁰"Report from Jim Sessions, SEJ Executive Director," August 8, 1978, Box 12, Folder "Southerners for Economic Justice," TWUA records, WHS, 396. SEJ put pressure on Stevens through letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and rallies, television and magazine ads, and protesting at stockholder meetings. In January 1978, for instance, SEJ paid for a television commercial, featuring Tom Banks and Ken Reaves of the St. Louis Cardinals, a professional football team that later moved to Arizona, which aired on Greenville, South Carolina, stations just days before the Super Bowl. Banks likened the Stevens campaign to the struggle to organize professional football players.²¹"Letter to Harold McIver from Bill Finger, with ad script enclosed," December 22, 1977, Box 12, Folder "Southerners For Economic Justice," TWUA records, WHS, 396. SEJ helped the union secure boycott endorsements from civic and religious organizations against Stevens products and the stores that sold them. The United Presbyterian Church identified three Biblical concepts that supported workers' right to organize and passed a resolution that urged its two-and-a-half million members to make a "public witness" through the boycott and "cast their economic ballots in favor of collective bargaining."²²"Final report and recommendations on the J. P. Stevens situation, United Presbyterian General Assembly," May 29, 1979, Box 1799, Folder 144, AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department Southeastern Office Records,1974–1984, Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Atlanta, Georgia, Collection L1985-16. (Hereafter cited as "AFL-CIO Civil Rights Dept. SE Office records, GSU Library.")

The boycott, as Spzak makes clear, "brought the issue of J. P. Stevens workers to the public eye and into the public arena."²³Spzak interview. This did not guarantee change. In a 1976 working paper, SEJ admitted that "the participants in the J. P. Stevens campaign . . . are relatively unknown to most people," making it difficult to "define the merits" of unionization. The participants were "vast numbers of working women who call on the average consumers of Stevens products—another working woman—to help them earn a living for their families."²⁴"Southerners for Economic Justice, Working Paper on J. P. Stevens Campaign," December 1976, Box 1799, Folder 130, AFL-CIO Civil Rights Dept. SE Office records, GSU Library. The personal testimonies of white and African American women workers sought to transform public attention into action. Rank-and-file women displayed their paychecks, private lives, and their bodies as evidence of injustice and as a call to action.

Woman Working with Textiles, ca. late 1970s. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Southern Labor Archives, Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, Memphis-Jackson Joint Board Records, L1992-11_73.

Lucy Taylor was the president of the Roanoke Rapids chapter of the Carolina Brown Lung Association, a group dedicated to getting compensation for mill workers afflicted with respiratory diseases caused by inhaling cotton fibers. She was a fiery public speaker, peppering her speeches with statements like, "They gave me brown lung, I'm giving them hell." Taylor testified at the 1977 annual J. P. Stevens stockholder meeting that at Stevens the "machinery [is] more important than people."²⁵Conway, Rise Gonna Rise, 131, 136. Mildred Whitley of the West Boylston plant in Montgomery, Alabama, explained that after she had a mastectomy, her supervisor told her she could either continue working at the expected pace or go on welfare. SEJ printed her photograph and story in fliers and newsletters sent to supporting organizations, such as the National Alliance Against Racism and Political Repression.²⁶"J. P. Stevens Flier," undated, Box 2, Folder ‘Behavior Control," National Alliance Against Racism & Political Repression Collection, The Schomburg Library, New York City, New York. (Hereafter cited as "NAARPR, Schomburg.") In an interview with the Appalachian magazine, Mountain Life and Work, Addie Jackson of Statesboro, Georgia, linked the treatment of black mill workers to the history of chattel slavery.²⁷"Testimony of Addie Jackson," Mountain Life and Work: The Magazine of the Appalachian South, Volume 53, No. 3 (April 1977), accessed in the Sutton collection, ACC, 986.87. At the labor law reform hearings in Roanoke Rapids in 1977, Louise Bailey, a spinner for thirty-six years, testified that her support of the union in the 1940s got her blackballed for four years. "I feel just sick to my gut," said Bailey, "because when I go in [to work] now, I don't know whether I am going to have a job or not. I know what it is to go hungry. I know what it is when you have a child."²⁸Testimony of Louise Bailey at the congressional field hearings on national labor law reform, the Roanoke Rapids Civic Center, Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, August 9, 1977, quoted in Conway, Rise, Gonna Rise, 142.

The women's stories made visceral and vivid the abstractions of labor law violations and corporate intransigence. The everyday details in the stories drew the public sympathetically into the workers' lives and complaints: how they had to eat their lunches in the bathrooms because the air in the mill was thick with "cotton dust"; how foremen told crude jokes and vulgar stories to harass and intimidate them; how Stevens monitored bathroom breaks, embarrassing female workers when their "womanly troubles" required more frequent visits; how the company passed them over for promotions and raises because of their sex or race or both. Lucy Taylor's husband quipped that he should sue Stevens for "alienation of affection" because the couple slept in separate beds when brown lung kept Lucy coughing all night. Then he added, "When she gets quiet, I start to worry that she's dead."²⁹The examples of harassment and intimidation that the women described can be found in: Fred Powledge, "The South Will Fall Again," Penthouse, May 1979, 72–79, and Wayne King, "Southern Leaders Form Group to Support Stevens Textile Workers," New York Times, December 12, 1976. Both articles were accessed at Sutton, ACC, 986.87. For personal testimony on women experiencing racial and sexual discrimination in hiring and job placement in the mills, see Conway, Rise Gonna Rise, 109–113. Lucy Taylor's husband quoted in Conway, Rise, Gonna Rise, 86.

Religious Support for Stevens Workers after the 1974 Election Victory

SEJ focused much of its energies on religious leaders and church groups and on publicizing their support. This was especially important in mill towns, where churches provided space for gatherings, were often the center of community life, and lent moral credibility to the activities on their grounds. Chip Hughes and Len Stanley, organizers for the Carolina Brown Lung Association (CBLA) in Erwin, North Carolina, noted that most workers they encountered had grafted their union and CBLA activism onto their church activities. Stanley noted that this was especially true of the women, who organized fish fries and potluck dinners that brought activists and workers together.³⁰Len Stanley from field notes of interview with Betty Bailey, Len Stanley and Thad Moore by Alicia J. Rouverol January 6, 1995, (G-0222), in the Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007), Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chip Hughes recalled the importance of church organizing experience for the elderly women in Erwin. Joseph "Chip" Hughes, recorded interview with the author, December 20, 2011, in author's possession. (Hereafter cited as "Hughes interview.") SEJ's independence from the union allowed it to work through institutions that might have been prejudiced against or wary of organized labor. Spzak recalls that a Free Will Baptist church in Spartanburg, South Carolina, lent its bus to Stevens workers protesting in Columbia.³¹Spzak interview. Aware that organized religion in the South was often a strong force working against unionization, SEJ sought to organize through sympathetic churches to demonstrate "with maximum visibility the broad range of citizens and southern leaders that support the J. P. Stevens workers" and "minimize the potential for the Stevens campaign to be viewed as a contest between ‘big labor' and ‘big business.'"³²"Southerners for Economic Justice, Working Paper on J. P. Stevens Campaign," December 1976, Box 1799, Folder 130, AFL-CIO Civil Rights Dept. SE Office records, Georgia State University Library.

SEJ reported that in 1977 it held more than sixty workshops with ministers, local leaders, and teachers in almost thirty towns and cities and five universities in Tennessee, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama.³³"Proposal for SEJ's Third Year," August 8, 1978, Box 12, Folder "Southerners for Economic Justice," TWUA records, WHS, 396. In November 1978, SEJ sponsored a conference, "The Church's Responsibility in the Changing Southern Economy; Case Study: The Church and J. P. Stevens," at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina. Seventy clergy and laity from Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, DC, and the Carolinas participated, representing seven different Christian denominations. In the summer of 1979, SEJ secured a $5,000 donation for the Stevens campaign from the World Council of Churches and organized an economic justice ministry with Sister Mary Priniski in Rock Hill, South Carolina.³⁴"Conference pamphlet, ‘The Church's Responsibility in the Changing Southern Economy; Case Study: The Church and J. P. Stevens,'" November 4 and 5, 1978. "Report from Bill Finger, SEJ Staffer, to Harold McIver," January 19, 1978. "Memo to SEJ Board of Directors, two-month report July 15-Sept. 15, 1979 from Jim Sessions, Director," September 1979. All items from Box 12, Folder "Southerners for Economic Justice," TWUA records, WHS, 396.

Southeners for Economic Justice (SEJ) pamphlet for the symposium for southern churches held in North Carolina, November 4-5, 1978. Courtesy of the Textile Union of America records, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin.

In Roanoke Rapids in February and November of 1977, Reverend Jim Sessions, then an organizer with the Southern Appalachian Ministry and soon-to-be director of SEJ, and Collins Kilburn of the North Carolina Council of Churches met with ministers of Rosemary United Methodist, First United Methodist, and First Presbyterian churches. "All three are generally supportive of the workers' right to organize," Finger summarized in a report to ACTWU, however they "had some reservations about the boycott." First Union Methodist's pastor had many "high level management people in his church" who did not "believe in the tactic of a boycott," but admitted the NLRB process was an inefficient way to resolve the impasse over a contract. The minister of First Presbyterian, "a patriarch in town [with] some 35 years at the same church," agreed to publicly state that he supported the workers' right to form a union, but felt the boycott "might hurt the town."³⁵"Staff Report by Jim Sessions, Southern Appalachian Ministry," November 3, 1977, and "Report to Concerned Parties by Bill Finger," Box 12, Folder "Southerners for Economic Justice," TWUA records, WHS, 396. While many African American and northern Baptist and Methodist churches and Catholic leaders endorsed the boycott, the support of white southern Protestant churches was more difficult to secure. Getting white southern church leaders to agree to any public acknowledgement of workers' rights—or even just neutrality rather than anti-unionism—was a step forward. Union organizer Joe Uehlein recounts meetings in which he helped Spzak and Sessions talk with anti-union Baptist preachers in Mississippi, explaining that, "Our hope was—and it worked—was to neutralize them so they wouldn't preach against the union."³⁶Joseph Uehlein, recorded interview with the author, March 24, 2012, in author's possession. (Hereafter cited as "Uehlein interview.")

By 1979, an array of religious groups endorsed the boycott: the National Council of Churches, the Women's Division of the United Methodist Church (with nearly one million members), the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church, the National Council of Catholic Women, the National Council of Catholic Charities, the Commission on Religion in Appalachia, and the North Carolina Council of Churches.³⁷"ACTWU Press Release," December 1978, Box 25, Folder "IUD information," TWUA records, WHS, 396. At a Roman Catholic Call to Action conference in Detroit, Michigan, in October 1976, the participating bishops issued a statement that advocated the repeal of right-to-work laws and urged the Catholic Church to "commit itself with monies and human resources to aid the struggle of non-union workers to organize in the South, especially the textile industry."³⁸"Catholic Leaders Urge Church to Aid the Organizing Struggle of Textile Workers in the South," Labor Unity 62, no. 13 (December 1976): 11, Sutton, ACC, 986.87. "We believe that those multinational corporations [like] J. P. Stevens . . . must be challenged by Christians in the name of the Lord," extolled the National Coalition of American Nuns. Forty-three-year-old Lucille Sampson, an African American who worked for SEJ after Stevens fired her from its Greenville plant, explained, "They [anti-union co-workers] put you through mental torture. [But] God says, ‘Fear not for I am with thee,' so I'm not afraid."³⁹Quotation from the National Coalition of American Nuns from Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!, 96. Quotation from Lucille Sampson in "Church Women Investigate J. P. Stevens & Company," undated clipping from the newsletter of Church Women United, The Church Woman, page 24, Box 12, Folder "Southerners for Economic Justice," TWUA records, WHS, 396. ACTWU secretary-treasurer Jacob Sheinkman and boycott director Del Mileski claimed that the union's boycott "stirred the nation's conscience" and received more support than the Farah or the United Farm Workers boycotts. SEJ's organizing carried ACTWU's message through networks the union could not or would not work through. Support from preachers, churchwomen, and priests infused the Stevens campaign with a moral urgency and righteous indignation.

Labor Feminism

Woman Working in a Textile Plant, Tennessee, circa late 1970s. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Southern Labor Archives, Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, Memphis-Jackson Joint Board Records, L1992_11_88.		African American Woman Working in a Textile Plant, Tennessee, circa late 1970s. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Southern Labor Archives, Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, Memphis-Jackson Joint Board Records, L1992_11_91.

In the last twenty years, historians and feminist scholars have challenged stereotypes and popular images of second-wave feminism, revealing the feminisms of women of color, the gender-conscious activism of working-class women, and the concerns for economic justice that infused many feminist agendas in the 1970s.⁴⁰See for instance: Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Anne M. Valk, Radical Sisters: Second-wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington, D.C. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Dennis Deslippe, Rights, Not Roses: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Donald Mathews and Jane Sherron De Hart, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State and the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Stephanie Gilmore, ed., Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); Stephanie Gilmore, Groundswell: Grassroots Feminist Activism in Postwar America (New York: Routledge, 2012); Lisa Levenstein, "‘Don't Agonize, Organize!': The Displaced Homemakers Campaign and the Contested Goals of Postwar Feminism," Journal of American History 100, no. 4 (March 2014): 1114–1138; Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar's Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); Anna Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Melissa Estes Blair, Revolutionizing Expectations: Women's Organizations, Feminism, and the Transformation of Political Culture, 1965–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014). Dozens of women's rights groups endorsed the Stevens boycott, including: the National Organization for Women (NOW), the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), Church Women United, the National Assembly of Women Religious (NAWR), and the YWCA. Bella Abzug, NOW president Eleanor Smeal, Jane Fonda, and Gloria Steinem spoke in support of the union's campaign. In March 1978, representatives from more than thirty women's organizations met in Washington and established the National Women's Committee to Support J. P. Stevens Workers. The Committee organized letter-writing campaigns aimed at major department store chains, urging them not to sell Stevens products. "As the major purchasers of domestic products," one letter to Woolworth's stated, "we are using our consumer power to help bring justice to the workplace at J. P. Stevens."⁴¹"ACTWU Press Release," December 1978, TWUA records, WHS, Box 25, Folder "IUD information," 396; Social Justice 17 (May 1978), accessed in Sutton collection ACC, 986.87; quotation in Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!, 98. The New York chapter of NOW burned Stevens bedsheets in front of Madison Square Garden. The Durham chapter held NOW meetings in the state AFL-CIO's Labor Temple, where they connected their efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment with the Stevens campaign.⁴²"Letters from Harriet Hopkins (coordinator of the NOW Durham chapter) to NC AFL-CIO president Wilbur Hobby," September 10 and 22, 1978, Box 2376, Folder 15; "News from the AFL-CIO: ERA," July 7, 1976, Box 2349, Folder 2, both items in NC State AFL-CIO 1950-81, GSU; "Let's Stand Together: The Story of Ella Mae Wiggins," September 14, 1979, Metrolina Chapter of NOW, Charlotte, NC, in Sutton, ACC, 986.87. See also Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!, 96–98.

Crystal Lee Sutton's speaking tour as "the real Norma Rae" provided the most public example of the connection between labor and feminism in the Stevens campaign and demonstrated how personal narratives engaged a broader public. Norma Rae was a rare Hollywood movie: a sympathetic portrayal of organized labor with a female protagonist. The Washington Post editorialized that "chances were better than good that [audiences] would emerge from the theater cheering for Norma Rae and the Union against the Big, Powerful, Impersonal Company."⁴³"Norma Rae 1, J. P. Stevens 0," Washington Post, October 24, 1980, accessed in Sutton collection, ACC, 986.87. Sutton was disappointed that the film obscured the role of other workers—especially the black workers—who sacrificed their time and often their jobs for the campaign. She also disliked the movie's portrayal of her character as a promiscuous and directionless unwed mother whose romantic interest in the union organizer motivated her activism.⁴⁴Sutton expressed her displeasure with the movie in several interviews: Mary Bishop, "The Diary of a Union Organizer," Charlotte Observer, May 7, 1978, Section D, 1, 3; Megan Rosenfeld, "Through the Mill with Crystal Lee and ‘Norma Rae,'" Washington Post, June 11, 1980; C. S. Crawford, "Life on Film? One-time Organizer, Crystal Lee Says Movie Is Based On Her Life," Greensboro Daily Times, April 18, 1979; William C. Lhotka, "Real-life Norma Rae Recalls Stevens Fight During St. Louis Visit," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 14, 1980, 12A; all accessed at Sutton, ACC, 986.87. Scenes that demonstrate Norma Rae's personal growth hinge on her sexuality: her prior promiscuity, the sexual tension between her and union organizer Reuben Warshowsky, and her revelations about her past to her children. In contrast, director Martin Ritt desexualized Warshowsky to protect "the whole moral fiber of the film" so that it would not seem to audiences that the organizer "was going from one town to another, screwing every dame he made a connection with."⁴⁵Ritt quoted in Lyn Goldfarb and Anatoli Ilyashov, "Working Class Hero: An Interview with Martin Ritt," in Martin Ritt: Interviews, ed. Gabriel Miller (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2003), 87. The audience, Ritt believed, needed to see Norma Rae's sexuality in order to understand her commitment to the union, but they could not see Warshowsky's sexuality if they were to believe in his integrity.

Whatever misgivings Sutton had about Norma Rae and the script's sexual double standard, she eagerly supported the Stevens campaign. The union ignored the movie's poetic license and embraced its potential to raise public awareness. ACTWU sent publicist Gail Jeffords on a nationwide speaking tour with Sutton. Jeffords wrote to Mileski that Sutton was "a proven media ‘draw,'" and that "ACTWU's position in the Stevens conflict can only be enhanced by taking advantage of her inherent usefulness in public relations." In the first six months of 1980, Sutton was featured in fifty-seven newspapers and made sixty-three appearances on local television and thirty-nine on radio, reaching a potential audience of seventy-five million people.⁴⁶"Gail Jeffords to Del Mileski," October 16, 1979, and "Gail Jeffords to Murray Finley et al, Final Media Report on Media Coverage for Crystal Lee Sutton," June 30, 1980, both in Box 23, Folder 25, ACTWU Papers, Organizing Department Records, the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 5619/007. (Hereafter cited as "ACTWU Paper, Kheel Center, Cornell University.) On Sutton's "Norma Rae" tour, see also Hodges, "The Real Norma Rae," 267.

A Woman's Place Is in Her Union, button by the Women's Department of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, date unknown. Photograph by the Minnesota Historical Society. Featured on the Minnesota Historical Society's Collections Up Close Blog. Courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society.

Across the country, labor activists arranged screenings of Norma Rae. Reverend Finlator wrote to North Carolina AFL-CIO president Wilbur Hobby recommending that when introducing the film, Hobby should "mention that it was the Women who shut down the machines first—Black and White."⁴⁷"‘Rev. – W. W. Finlator – Best Regards,' handwritten letter from Finlator to Wilbur Hobby," undated, Box 2363, Folder 1, North Carolina State AFL-CIO records, 1945–1981, GSU Library, L1981-20. In May 1979 in Laurens, South Carolina, the Oaks Cinema cancelled the screenings of Norma Rae after the manager received harassing phone calls and unknown individuals attempted to tear down the cinema's marquee. SEJ organized a petitioning campaign to the stars of the film from moviegoers in Laurens. One handwritten letter accompanying the petitions stated, "We beg you Mr. Liebman [Ron Leibman, who played the union organizer] please don't let us miss Norma Rae. We have heard so much about it and want to see it in our home town where it should be shown." The authors added, "P.S. There is a J. P. Stevens supervisor who works part time at the Oaks Theater."⁴⁸"Notes on Norma Rae viewings and controversy at the Oaks Cinema," dated April 30–May 18, 1979, TWUA records, WHS, Box 25, Folder "Norma Rae (cancellation)," 396.

Norma Rae and Sutton's speaking tour garnered support for the Stevens campaign from feminists and women's groups. Sutton renewed her ties with Gloria Steinem, who wrote a scathing indictment of Stevens's labor law violations in the Village Voice. Sutton was in conversation with Barbara Kopple, director of the 1977 Oscar-winning documentary of a Kentucky coalminers' strike Harlan County USA, hoping to collaborate on a more factual account of Sutton's experiences with Lily Tomlin in the leading role. Sutton connected the movie's theme of a woman's liberation from her dependency on men with the fight for economic justice in the textile industry. She reminded audiences that in the mills, "women stay on those same jobs year after year with no promotions and few raises [and] it's women who have to smile and flirt to be sure they keep their jobs or don't get impossible jobs."⁴⁹For more quotations from Sutton that connected economic justice and women's liberation, see Elizabeth Stone, "Norma Rae: The Story They Could Have Told," Ms. Magazine, May 1979, 30–32; Mary Bishop, "The Diary of a Union Organizer," Charlotte Observer, May 7, 1978, Section D, 1, 3; Anicia Lane, "Fact and Fiction: Crystal Lee Sutton Insists She Is Not ‘Norma Rae,'" Signal, April 8, 1980, 10–12. On the number of women in the US labor force in the 1970s, see: "U.S. Department of Labor Employment Standards Administration Women's Bureau ‘Highlights of Women's Employment and Education,'" Box 2443, Folder 18, NC AFL-CIO State Records, GSU. Sutton quoted in "Transcript, International Women's Day Speech," March 8, 1980, Sutton, ACC, 986.87. For scholarly analyses of the themes of unionism and feminism in the movie, see Edward Benson and Sharon Hartman Strom, "Crystal Lee, Norma Rae, and All Their Sisters: Working Women on Film," Film Library Quarterly 12, no. 2/3 (1979): 18–23, and Gay P. Zieger and Robert H. Zieger, "Unions on the Silver Screen: A Review-Essay of F.I.S.T., Blue Collar, and Norma Rae," Labor History 23, no. 1 (Winter 1982): 67–78. She described letting housework take a backseat to the organizing drive in 1973 and the strain on her marriage. "When I got involved with the union there was just no way that I could do [all the housework]," Sutton explained, "And that started causing trouble [at home]."⁵⁰Sutton quoted in Megan Rosenfeld "Through the Mill With Crystal Lee and ‘Norma Rae,'" Washington Post, June 11, 1980.

Sutton's stories and Norma Rae rang true to many women in the 1970s who discovered a new vocabulary through the women's movement for discussing the challenges they faced as daughters, wives, mothers, and workers.⁵¹For an example of southern feminist literature on changing men's attitudes and reforming the institutions they dominated, see Gainesville Women's Liberation Movement, "What Men Can Do for Women's Liberation" in Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women's Liberation Movement, eds., Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 76–77. For an example of an evangelical feminist leader addressing Christian men's unease with women's liberation, see Letha Scanzoni, "How to Live with a Liberated Wife," Christianity Today, June 4, 1976, 6–9. Pat Burgess, for instance, worked at the White Horse and Monaghan Textile plants in Greenville, South Carolina, in the 1970s. When she saw Norma Rae in the theater, she told the Greenville News and Piedmont, "I got so excited I had to holler two or three times." Burgess's coworkers shunned her for passing out union literature. "It's like you're working in a pit of snakes," she said. "Those ladies, I love them, but they're afraid, they define their opinions with what their husbands think."⁵²Sharon Todd, "Two Reviews of Norma Rae," March 25, 1979, Greenville News and Piedmont, Box 26, Folder "Norma Rae Articles," TWUA records, WHS, 396. Charlotte Brody, an activist who lived in Roanoke Rapids from 1976–1979 and worked for the union and the Carolina Brown Lung Association, traveled with Stevens workers to hearings and rallies up and down the eastern seaboard. On the long bus rides, Brody recalls, white and African American working-class women talked about their lives and families. "They were basically saying," Brody recounts, "this is who I always had to be, this is how I always had to fight."⁵³Charlotte Brody, recorded interview with the author, September 3, 2011, in author's possession. (Hereafter cited as "Brody interview.") Some African American women, such as Roanoke Rapids worker Lucy Sledge, had previous organizing experiences with the NAACP and the Halifax County Voters Movement. Many older white women drew on their experiences in church ladies auxiliaries. For most, the campaign was their first chance to be leaders and to speak out as women and workers. Norma Rae was the first time they saw their stories on the big screen.

The extent to which southern working-class women embraced (or even tolerated) the principles and values of women's liberation should not be exaggerated. Brody recalls white working-class women punishing her through gossip and shunning for wearing tight pants and a two-piece bathing suit: "Your politics alone were enough to dismiss you and to suggest that you were less worthy. And then if anybody knew anything about your sexual politics . . . it meant that all forms of misogyny were deserved. It's a lot to stand up to. And people still did."⁵⁴Ibid. Maurine Hedgepeth, the middle-aged weaver in Roanoke Rapids who had won reinstatement and back pay, met Jane Fonda in 1977. Fonda was one of several actresses under consideration for the role of Norma Rae; she came to Roanoke Rapids to research the campaign and stayed in a rental house owned by the Hedgepeth family. Hedgepeth told Fonda not to take the role because the movie would "throw us in a bad light" and the Norma Rae character was "a loose woman."⁵⁵Moe Foner, interviewed by Robert Master, Columbia University Oral History Research Office, Notable New Yorkers collection, Session 15, page 359, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/nny/fonerm/transcripts/fonerm_1_15_356.html, January 23, 1986. Hereafter cited as "Foner interview."

For some workers in Roanoke Rapids, whether pro- or anti-union, the organizing drive and nationwide campaign tapped into social anxieties in the 1970s: desegregation, sexual liberation, Watergate, the oil embargo, soaring inflation, and the ignominy surrounding the Vietnam War. The activism of mill women threatened the gender and sexual normalcy that structured family life and social relationships and supported privileges enjoyed by men and women, including local status and respect. Women such as Hedgepeth had good reason to be invested in the cultural strictures of respectable womanhood. Gossip and rumor had political purchase in Piedmont mill towns. For women labor activists, a sterling reputation as a "good woman" offered protection against accusations of impropriety.⁵⁶On the sense of social disorder in the 1970s, see Cowie, Stayin' Alive. For an excellent overview of African American experiences integrating the mills in the 1960s and 70s, see Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker. Nancy MacLean argues that "southern white mill workers did not, by and large, militantly act out anxieties about life troubles on black newcomers" in textile mills, but points out that white women "redrew racial boundaries around areas they had more power to control: courtship, family, and church life." "Redesigning Dixie," 179, 184. See also interviews with mill women in Roxanne Newton, Women Workers on Strike: Narratives of Southern Women Unionists (New York: Routledge, 2007); Victoria Morris Byerly, Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South (Ithaca: ILR Press, 1986); and Conway, Rise Gonna Rise, for evidence in the oral histories of white and African American workers that anxieties over racial integration in the mills tended to play out through social exclusivity rather than physical violence. Transgressions against gendered codes of ethics had consequences, from the loss of a job and friends to public shaming and abandonment. Millworkers relied heavily on "who you knew and how you were known" to get and keep a job at the mill. Reverend Joseph Battle, black pastor of the Quankey Baptist Church in Roanoke Rapids, recalled that in 1974 he went to Jessie Shaw, a white man whose family owned a store in town, to get a reference to work at Stevens. Shaw was "the person that folk listened to and if he gave you a reference, you were in."⁵⁷Reverend Joseph Battle, recorded interview with Rob Shapard and the author, December 4, 2013, in author's possession. (Hereafter cited as "Battle interview.") Good standing in the community was critical to white and African American working-class women. A damaged reputation, from fact or fiction, could mean unemployment and poverty. White and African American women took substantial risks when they stood for the union.

In the Textile Mills in Union Point, Greene County, Georgia, 1941. Photograph by Jack Delano. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USF34-046430-D.

The working-class women of the Stevens campaign joined a long history of "disorderly" working women who blended indictments of labor exploitation, gender inequality, and racial discrimination in their protests and resistance, from the mill girls who formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association in 1844, to the "washing Amazons" of the Atlanta laundresses' strikes in 1877 and 1881, to the female strikers who led the "flying squadrons" across the southern Piedmont in the 1934 General Textile Strike, and the women of the black freedom struggle who led "a rebellion of working-class women" in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.⁵⁸On the Lowell mill girls, see Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). On the "washing Amazons," see Tera Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1997). On the disorderly women of the 1920s strikes and 1934 General Textile Strike in the southern Piedmont, see Hall et al, Like A Family, and Hall, "Disorderly Women." The "rebellion of working-class women" quotation comes from Ruby Nell Sales, interview by Joseph Mosnier, Library of Congress, Civil Rights History Project, http://findingaids.loc.gov/db/search/xq/searchMferDsc04.xq?_id=loc.afc.eadafc.af013005&_start=58&_lines=125, April 25, 2011. Partial transcript in author's possession.

By the late 1970s, opportunities for living very different lives from their mothers arose for a younger generation of mill women. Cohabitation before marriage was more common, there were legal tools to combat discrimination and abuse, and for all but the most isolated of women, televised evidence of women's "liberation," from demonstrations in Durham, Atlanta, and Gainesville to sitcoms about single mothers like Alice.⁵⁹See, for instance: Cowie, Stayin' Alive; Enke, Finding the Movement; and Beth Bailey, "‘She Can Bring Home the Bacon': Negotiating Gender in Seventies America," in America in the Seventies, eds. Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 2004). Oral history interviews in the Southern Oral History Program's "The Women's Movement in the South" series U-16, and "The Women's Movement and North Carolina Churches," series R-25 offer many firsthand accounts of how the social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s changed women's communities and lives in North Carolina and east Tennessee. When Sutton graduated from high school in 1959, she could not imagine any options other than living with her parents or living with a husband. She had never worked closely with African American men or women. In 1974, Sutton befriended Jeannie Bailey and Cheryl Wasmund, two young white women at a Stevens Fabricating Plant who rented a trailer together in town. The three attended interracial union meetings in Sutton's home on Henry Street, next door to one of her foremen at Stevens.⁶⁰Leifermann, Crystal Lee, 132. Lucy Sledge came from a black working-class family in Halifax County, North Carolina, where her uncle Otis worked for the Stevens mills. In 1970, Sledge represented more than a thousand black workers in Roanoke Rapids in a class-action discrimination lawsuit against the company.⁶¹Conway, Rise Gonna Rise, 96–101, 109–113. The TWUA cheerleading squad may not have been the first time mill women brought their daughters into public protests, but because of the women's movement, it was broadcast on public television. "Looking back," said a Roanoke Rapids union activist, the Stevens campaign "really was a working-class women's campaign."⁶²Anonymous union activist, in discussion with the author, October 26, 2013.

At an event in New York City in 1980 celebrating an exhibition of photographs of southern textile workers, Roanoke Rapids weaver Maurine Hedgepeth apologized to Fonda for dissuading her from taking the Norma Rae role. Fonda embraced Hedgepeth and replied, "I've got China Syndrome, Sally [Field] has Norma Rae, we've both got big hits. So it's okay."⁶³Foner interview.

The Norma Raes Win a Contract and Create a Legacy

Women Support J. P. Stevens Workers. Courtesy of the National Alliance Against Racism & Political Repression Collection, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.

In 1980, ACTWU and J. P. Stevens agreed to a settlement. Stevens would not block negotiations over contracts in Roanoke Rapids plants and at West Boylston in Montgomery, Alabama, the two sites where the union had won bargaining rights. Stevens agreed to recognize the union at plants ACTWU was able to organize within the next year and a half. The company agreed to automatic check-off of dues, binding arbitration of grievances, and compensation for the wage increases the workers lost during the years spent trying to secure a contract. In the wake of the settlement, dozens of Roanoke Rapids workers joined the union for the first time. In return, ACTWU called off the boycott and agreed to not single out Stevens as a target in the corporate campaign.⁶⁴Minchin, Don't Sleep with Stevens!, 166–171.

Success came at a price. In debt, the union laid off many organizers and staffers. Stevens closed the West Boylston plant in 1982; the union negotiated severance pay. ACTWU won more than a third of its elections in the early 1980s, but this was overshadowed by plant closures and layoffs.⁶⁵Ibid., 175–176; Mary Robinson, Moisture of the Earth: Mary Robinson, Civil Rights and Textile Union Activist, An Oral History, Compiled and Edited by Fran Leeper Buss (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 180. Facing import rates that doubled in the 1980s, Stevens, like many textile and apparel manufacturers in the United States, reduced production and shut down many operations. There were more than two million textile and apparel workers in the United States in 1973. By 2009, there were 400,000, nearly all in the Carolinas. Between 1980 and 1985, ACTWU lost more than 50,000 members.⁶⁶Minchin, "Shutdowns in the Sun Belt," 260, 264. With the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, US-owned factories flourished in the maquiladora zone along the Mexican border, exacerbating the decline in textile and apparel manufacturing. The Piedmont lost hundreds of thousands of jobs between 1989 and 1999, and Asian imports continued to flood American markets, especially after China's admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001.⁶⁷Minchin, "Shutdowns in the Sun Belt," 267. See also Frederickson, Looking South, 241–246.

Production in Roanoke Rapids declined, but the mills—and the union—survived the 1980s. WestPoint Pepperell, Inc. bought J. P. Stevens in a leveraged buyout in 1988 and broke the corporation into three separate businesses. The mills in Roanoke Rapids continued operating under the Bibb Company, and in 1993 Bibb and WestPoint Pepperell merged to create WestPoint Stevens.⁶⁸Minchin, "Shutdowns in the Sun Belt," 265; Battle's interview. More information on the history of the J. P. Stevens textile corporation can be found at "Global Manufacturing," WestPoint Home, accessed August 9, 2017, http://www.westpointhome.com/about-us.html. When the last mill in Roanoke Rapids closed in 2003, WestPoint Stevens employed about three hundred workers, and the union local was part of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE). Two decades of assaults on organized labor through decertification campaigns, a deindustrialized manufacturing base, and hostility at the state and federal levels of government had considerably weakened the United States labor movement. Less than 10 percent of all textile and apparel workers in the United States were organized.⁶⁹Frederickson, Looking South, 235. Looking back over the previous thirty years, Bennett Taylor, president of Roanoke Rapids UNITE and one of the many African American workers who worked alongside Crystal Lee Sutton, considered the Stevens legacy with sadness and pride. "J. P. Stevens was, at that time, known as the number one lawbreaker, and for us to organize J. P. Stevens back then," he paused, and took a deep breath, "we made history. I think it's a good legacy. Maybe people don't talk about it enough."⁷⁰Taylor interviewed in "North Carolina Now," UNC-TV, June 25, 2003, accessed at Sutton, ACC, 986.87.

Mary Robinson was an in-plant organizer in Montgomery and president of the West Boylston local. "I was a nice, little old black girl from the country when I started," she says, "but Stevens made me a woman." When Stevens closed the West Boylston plant, Robinson worked at an axle-factory and then as a bus driver for juvenile disciplinary facilities. She organized the bus drivers and janitors and won representation by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. "I try to teach the support personnel what I learned in ACTWU," she said.⁷¹Robinson, Moisture of the Earth, 182, 184, 190. Reflections by working-class women who were leaders in the Stevens campaign echo Taylor's pride and suggest that the Stevens legacy has multiple layers. Crystal Lee Sutton declared that getting involved with the union "gave me an opportunity to be the woman I always wanted to be."⁷²Woman Alive!, Documentary. In the 1970s, after her marriage ended and she left Roanoke Rapids and J. P. Stevens, Sutton worked in a hotel and organized her co-workers at the Hilton Inn in Burlington, North Carolina. Her participation in the Stevens campaign gave her a sophisticated grasp of labor politics and her 1980 speaking tour as the "real Norma Rae" honed her skills. In a speech to flight attendants in Dallas, Texas, in 1987, she called for the elimination of the two-tier wage system, explaining how it disproportionately affected women and minorities and discouraged worker solidarity. At a high school in Graham, North Carolina, she warned students about letting racial differences impede class solidarity, telling them, "Green is the color we all need to be concerned about."⁷³"Crystal Lee Sutton's Union Experience," speech given at Graham High School, October 11, 2000; "Crystal Lee Sutton, the ‘real Norma Rae,'" speech given at the Professional Flight Attendants Union in Dallas, Texas, April 22, 1987. Both transcripts accessed at Sutton collection, ACC, 986.87. She embraced her persona as the real Norma Rae and spoke across the United States, in Canada, and the Soviet Union. Since 1979, "Norma Rae" has become a title of sorts, bestowed on female activists to indicate a woman who is sometimes a feminist, usually a workers' rights advocate, and always a strong-willed leader. Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich nicknamed Ai-jen Poo, the founder of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the "Nannies' Norma Rae."⁷⁴Barbara Ehrenreich, "The Nannies' Norma Rae," April 26, 2011, New York Times, accessed May 6, 2014, http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/the-nannies-norma-rae. In an interview in 1995, Harold McIver, director of the Industrial Union Department's southern campaigns, continually referred to Sutton as "Norma Rae," suggesting the deep intertwining of movie and memory.⁷⁵Harold McIver, interview by Chris Lutz, Meansville, Georgia, Southern Labor Archives, Special Collections and Archives Department, GSU Library, September 26, 1995.

J. P. Stevens Mill, Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, January 20, 2011. Photographs (above and below) by Donna Longenecker. Courtesy of Donna Longenecker.

Workers such as Mary Robinson regret the loss of their roles as activists. "I sit sometimes and think about all the wonderful people I met during our struggle," Robinson wrote, "and I think I wish that part of it was not over. Life is so short and the good times always go by so fast. But, as long as I can stay close to the labor movement in any way, I will be happy."⁷⁶Robinson, quoted in Dignity: Lower Income Women Tell of Their Lives and Struggles, ed. Fran Leeper Buss (University of Michigan Press, 1985), 244. For Mildred McEwen, working nights at the West Boylston mill made her feel alone and "empty." Two things comforted her: watching the 700 Club and working for the union: "I think working with the union is a real Christian act because you're working for other people, not just yourself. I could do something else, I don't have to be there [but] I want to see it through."⁷⁷Whitley quoted in Buss, Dignity, 241–242, and in Labor Unity, November 1980, 7, Sutton, 986.87, ACC. When the mill closed, McEwen left Montgomery to live with her daughter.

In Roanoke Rapids, the legacy of the Stevens campaign took hold in workers' engagement with local politics. Bennett Taylor, James Boone, and Maurine Hedgepeth became active in voter registration drives and local elections. Between 1974 and 1984, voter registration increased by 20 percent in Halifax County (where the mills were located) and nearby Northampton County. For minority residents, registration more than doubled.

Edith Jenkins, one of the first African American women hired as an operative in the late 1960s, supported the 1973–1974 union drive. In the summer of 1985, she organized other black mothers through the Parent Teacher Association to picket the Weldon school superintendent—a white man in a school district that was 90 percent black—after he fired three black administrators. (Weldon is a small town east of Roanoke Rapids in Halifax County.) In 1992, Jenkins won a seat on the school board. "You've got to fight just to survive around here," she said. "That's how we won the union, that's how I won my school board seat."⁷⁸William Adler, "A New Day in Dixie," Southern Exposure 22, no. 1 (1994): 18.

In 1993, union workers allied with the NAACP to stop a toxic incinerator from being built near a low-income African American neighborhood in Northampton County.⁷⁹Ibid., 24–25. The Stevens campaign had a lasting impact on its participants, especially the women. Their experiences as organizers and leaders motivated them as activists in other political arenas long after the 1980 settlement. Their years as union activists gave them knowledge, skills, and a sense of confidence and purpose that bolstered them long after the Stevens campaign ended.

The union learned lessons from the Stevens campaign that supported later efforts. ACTWU became UNITE in the 1980s and continued to organize in the South. Plant closures made organizing more difficult, but did not completely halt the union's efforts. In one instance, UNITE organizers followed laid-off garment workers in the Miami, Florida, area into their new occupations in nursing homes and successfully organized about 250 workers.⁸⁰Bruce Nissen, "A Different Kind of Union: SEIU Healthcare Florida from the Mid-1990s through 2009," in Zieger, Life and Labor in the New New South, 291. Willie Jones, currently the Southern Region Organizing Director for Workers United, worked in the Cone Brothers's White Oak Cotton Mills in Greensboro, North Carolina, in the late 1970s. Jones recalled that when she began working at the mill, the union's leadership "didn't reflect the people that [they] were actually representing." She credits Bruce Raynor, president of UNITE and Workers United, for the change that occurred in the early 1980s. When he took over as director of the southern region, she noted, "women got a chance and minorities got a chance." Raynor started his career as an ACTWU organizer during the Stevens campaign.⁸¹Willie Jones, recorded interview with the author, January 15, 2010, in author's possession.

Southerners for Economic Justice continued organizing in the Carolinas after the 1980 settlement. Its "job rights workshops" in unorganized plants in the Carolinas developed into the Worker's Rights Project (WRP), which claimed several state legislative victories, most notably a 1986 South Carolina law making it harder for companies to dismiss injured workers. WRP expanded into the Carolina Alliance for Fair Employment (CAFÉ) in 1987, which then broadened to include concerns over immigration, criminal justice, and domestic violence.⁸² Janice Fine, "Workers Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream," February 2006, "Publications," Economic Policy Institute, accessed May 6, 2014, http://www.epi.org/publication/books_worker_centers/. With organized labor under attack from corporations, think tanks, well-funded political action committees, and some state governments, the numbers of functioning labor temples and union halls has fallen across the United States, making projects like WRP and CAFÉ all the more valuable for worker education and empowerment.

Postcard featuring Crystal Sutton, ca. 1979. Courtesy of The Crystal Sutton Collection, The Learning Resources Center, Alamance Community College, Graham, North Carolina.

While the Stevens campaign did not have the effect on other corporations that ACTWU hoped it would, it promoted women's leadership and a more community-based approach that many organizers adopted in the 1980s and 1990s.⁸³Groups like Interfaith Workers organize within and without the formal institutions of the labor movement on issues of wage theft, the right to collective bargaining, immigration and labor laws, and corporate responsibility for workers' safety and public health. See "History," Interfaith Worker Justice, accessed May 6, 2014, http://www.iwj.org/about/history. For a recent essay on the alliances between labor and women's groups in North Carolina, see Jennifer Ferris, "Are you One of the 90,000 NC Women Living on the Edge?," March 19, 2014, Women AdvaNCe, accessed June 3, 2014, http://womenadvancenc.org/are-you-one-of-the-90000-nc-women-living-on-the-edge/. For a recent essay on conservative and corporate alliances against labor and religious organizers responses in North Carolina's "Moral Mondays," see Dan T. Carter, "North Carolina: A State of Shock," September 24, 2013, Southern Spaces, accessed June 3, 2014, https://southernspaces.ecdsdev.org/2013/north-carolina-state-shock. Joe Uehlein worked under Harold McIver, organizing furniture workers in 1979 in Tupelo, Mississippi, in an "experimental organizing project where [we] organized through the churches. We set up the women's organizing project. We were doing all this community stuff, which Harold had no patience for." Uehlein reflects on the changes in the union leadership's attitudes in the 1980s, a change he credits to the 1970s Stevens campaign. In Tupelo he hired two women organizers. "I remember it really clearly," he says, "because when [they] showed up, it was like the talk of the union movement." By the late 1980s, the Industrial Union Department had set up the Women's Organizing Project and female staffers and organizers were more common. "A lot of things led to that, but clearly the J. P. Stevens thing, with Norma Rae the movie coming out, Crystal Lee being the leader, that had a lot to do with it."⁸⁴Uehlein interview. The architects of the Stevens campaign and the working-class women who put themselves front and center to win a contract blazed a trail for future organizers and women workers that has outlasted the mills they organized.

About the Author

Joey Fink is a PhD candidate in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation, "The Many Norma Raes," examines the roles of working-class women in the campaign to unionize the J. P. Stevens textile plants in the Piedmont South in the 1970s. While tracing the connections between the women's movement, civil rights groups, and liberal religious organizations in the labor struggle, Fink explores the local contexts and national platforms in which white and African American textile women became leaders and spokeswomen for a workers' rights movement.

Review

Released on July 1, 2012, Anne Braden: Southern Patriot examines the remarkable life of civil rights activist Anne Braden in the context of the social justice movements of her time: labor rights, civil rights, anti-war activism, women’s liberation, and gay rights. Based on oral history interviews and rich with archival photographs and footage, this documentary narrates Braden's challenge to systemic racism and economic inequality in the United States. Intended to reach a broad audience through television airings, distribution to high schools and colleges, and presentations by grassroots organizations and churches throughout the United States, Anne Braden has screened in Austin, Louisville, Lexington, Oakland, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Vancouver with more viewings scheduled. Kentucky Public Television (KETKY) has rebroadcast Anne Braden five times since first airing it on October 29, 2012.

Filmmakers Anne Lewis (associate director, Harlan County, USA) and Mimi Pickering (Director, The Buffalo Creek Flood) worked with Braden to make this documentary, recording a series of conversations over more than two years. Initially a reluctant subject, Braden confides on camera that being the focus of such attention "embarrasses me highly." Eventually, she grew more trusting of these two filmmaking veterans, relaxed and told her story. But Braden never relinquished control of her narrative. As Anne Lewis put it, Braden "refused to be reduced to sound bites and would command me to be patient if I tried to steer her in any way." Cinematically straightforward, Anne Braden: Southern Patriot resembles Henry Hampton’s Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (Part 1, 1986; Part 2, 1989) in narrative style, content, and editing.

Anne Braden in the SCEF office where she edited The Southern Patriot, Louisville, Kentucky, October 1962. Reproduced by permission from the Wisconsin Historical Society.

The DVD cover of Anne Braden shows its subject in a white turtleneck and black jumper, strikingly like a priestly garment and clerical collar. Although the documentary brushes aside her life-long devotion to organized religion, this image embodies the film’s argument—that she was a martyr to the causes she believed in, gave her life for others, and made sacrifices that far transcended the ordinary. Anne Braden details how as a child of the white southern middle-class, Braden grew up to critique the language of white supremacy and use her sharp intelligence and pragmatic skills as a journalist at the Anniston Star, the Birmingham News, and the Louisville Courier, to investigate case after case of racial injustice in the South and the nation. Her 1948 marriage to Carl Braden, the son of recent immigrants, forged a personal and political alliance that merged her commitment to racial integration with his close ties to the labor movement and the Socialist Party.

A first-person documentary based largely on biographer Catherine Fosl’s book, Subversive Southerner (2006), Southern Patriot is narrated principally by Braden. Fosl makes multiple appearances, recounting in a riveting statement early on that throughout Braden's long career, she never "took her hand off the plow" of social justice, and once her course was set, she did not look back. Interviews with a number of activists who worked with Braden across the decades recount stories of her dedication and vision. Brief, laudatory vignettes by Cornel West, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Reverend C.T. Vivian, and Angela Davis underscore the importance of Anne Braden’s path-breaking work on civil rights and discuss the implications of her activism for the twenty-first century.

Fred Wright, The Wade House Bombing Comic Strip, 1954. Reproduced by permission from the Wisconsin Historical Society.

The film recounts Anne and her husband Carl's 1954 decision to purchase a house in an all-white Louisville neighborhood for Andrew and Charlotte Wade, a young African American couple. The Wades moved in on May 15, 1954, two days before the US Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision striking down school segregation. Anne Braden documents in harrowing detail how this modest suburban home, first damaged by rocks and gunshots, and then partially destroyed by a bomb, became the focal point for desegregation in Louisville. The hostile white neighbors who had threatened the Wades' safety multiple times were never seriously questioned about these crimes. Rather, the state of Kentucky charged the Bradens with arson and sedition. Carl spent seven months of a fifteen year sentence in prison and lost his job at the Courier-Journal. In a low-pitched voice-over, Braden narrates over newspaper articles from the trials, photographs of the bombing, and film clips, including portions of an interview with Andrew Wade. She analyzes the context of this pivotal civil rights case, concluding that: "The anti-Communist sort of hysteria that was gripping the country and the anti-Black hysteria that was certainly gripping the South, all got rolled up in a ball and hurled at us. We were traitors to the country, to our race, we were Communists; we were evil; we were the devil."

Andrew Wade and his wife and daughter stand in front of their damaged house, May 16, 1954, from the Louisville Courier-Journal. Reproduced by permission from the Wisconsin Historical Society.	Social activists Carl and Anne Braden, taken about the time of their marriage, 1948. Reproduced by permission from the Wisconsin Historical Society.

The Bradens deepened their commitment to activism. Their reputation as "subversives" followed them into the wider civil rights movement. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Bradens worked in relative isolation, especially in the South, and were treated like political and social pariahs in their hometown. Until decades after Carl’s death from a heart attack in 1975, even groups dedicated to social change spurned their participation. Blacklisted from employment, Anne and Carl Braden accepted an offer from the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), an outgrowth of the New Deal era's Southern Conference for Human Welfare. They worked as SCEF organizers out of Louisville on a comprehensive civil rights agenda aimed at ending segregation and extending the power of trade unions. For years Anne Braden used her talents as a journalist to edit SCEF’s widely read radical left newsletter The Southern Patriot.

Cover of Free Thomas Wansley: A letter to white Southern women from Anne Braden, 1972. Print by John Wilson. Courtesy of Emory University's Manuscript, Archive, and Rare Book Library. Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3 - Page 4

The film Anne Braden: Southern Patriot shows how Anne Braden found her voice as a southern white woman after following the advice of William Patterson, the African American founder of the radical Civil Rights Congress. Braden recounts on camera how Patterson told her: "You don’t have to be part of the world of the lynchers; you can join the 'Other America,' the people who struggled against slavery . . . the white people who supported them, the people who all through Reconstruction struggled." He listed all those who have worked against injustice, she remembers, and at this point when "I was hardly dry behind the ears . . . that’s what I needed to hear." Braden heeded Patterson’s counsel, cast her lot with those in the "Other America," and shaped a broad vision of solidarity that encompassed past generations of American dissidents, those involved in current struggles, and those who would continue to fight for social and economic justice. Relatively slow to embrace women’s liberation, Anne Braden came to see feminism and eventually gay rights as natural extensions of the civil rights movement. In December 1972 she penned "A letter to white Southern women," (included in a PDF on the Anne Braden DVD), whom she addressed as "my white sisters." She made a powerful plea to white women of the South, who she argued "belong in this fight," to join a campaign to free Thomas Wansley, a young black man arrested at age sixteen who had spent a decade in prison on a fabricated rape charge. Braden reflects on this case in Anne Braden and restates her argument that: "no white woman reared in the South—or perhaps anywhere in this racist country—can find freedom as a woman until she deals in her own consciousness with the question of race." Only women, she argued, could destroy "the myth of white Southern womanhood" by not remaining silent as black men die or go to prison.

Braden’s message and influence are made clear in Anne Braden, but the question of her motivation is one that the film skirts. What forces drove her to take up the cause social justice in such a decisive way? What gave Anne and Carl the courage, year after year, to dedicate everything they had to changing the world, to making real their shared vision of a beloved community built on racial equality and economic justice? How did she weave together the seemingly diverse elements of her background, religion, and education to take on the challenges of racial and economic justice in the second half of the twentieth century? How did she become a radical?

Anne Braden speaking at a rally, Louisville, Kentucky, 2002. Reproduced by permission from the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Anne Braden was an activist who left a rich bequest in the dozens of multi-racial activist groups that continue her work. By the final years of her life (she died in 2006) even longstanding arch-enemies acknowledged Braden as a heroine. Predominantly white liberal groups that had previously shunned her began presenting her with awards. The American Civil Liberties Union gave her the first Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty, and the Southern Regional Council bestowed its Lifetime Achievement Award. Once the tide turned Anne received multiple honorary degrees, and after her death, even the state of Kentucky went from vilifying her to paying "honor and tribute" in an official resolution. Anne Braden called these actions, "apologizing for fifty years of history." Anne Braden: Southern Patriot celebrates Braden’s long career, from 1948–2006, and what activist Angela Davis termed, her "inveterate optimism, even in the worst of times [and] her refusal to give up."

About the Author

Mary E. Frederickson is a professor of history at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, where her research and teaching centers upon women’s history and labor studies. She is the author of Looking South: Race, Gender, and the Transformation of Labor (University Press of Florida, 2011) and Gendered Resistance: Women, Slavery and the Legacy of Margaret Garner (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming 2013). During 2012–13, professor Frederickson has been a Mellon fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute working on a social and legal history of sickle cell disease. She will be a visiting professor in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University in 2013–14.

Documentary filmmaker George Stoney, 96, died this week. His films include The Uprising of '34 (1995), about a large and violent strike in the southern textile industry in 1934, and All My Babies (1952), about Georgia midwife Mary Coley. All My Babies was selected for the National Film Registry in 2002. Stoney was also an advocate for and creator of public-access television, a teacher at New York University, and a native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

He was remembered in the New York Times, the Village Voice, and by Tom Rankin at the Center for Documentary Studies. Adding to these accounts, below are links to the work and voice of Stoney himself—a discussion of making The Uprising of '34 and a discussion and streaming video of All My Babies and a 2010 follow-up documentary.