- [Announcer] A production of South Carolina ETV.

(pleasant guitar music) - Hello from Columbia, I'm Patti Just.

Our guest is Walter Edgar, the author of "South Carolina in the Modern Age," published by USC Press.

Dr.

Edgar, professor of history and director of the University of South Carolina's Institute for Southern Studies, is the author or editor of nine books dealing with South Carolina.

He received his bachelor's degree from Davidson College in North Carolina in 1965, and his master's and doctorate degrees from USC in 1967 and '69 respectively.

He currently lives in Columbia.

And Dr.

Edgar, thank you so much for being with us.

- Patti, it's my pleasure.

- You obviously have been studying the state for some time and have written a lot about it.

- I've been doing it ever since I was in graduate school.

I did my doctoral dissertation on colonial libraries and also at that time began editing "The Letterbook of Robert Pringle," which was published as a South Carolina Tricentennial publication in 1972.

And I came back to South Carolina by accident.

I was really trained as a colonial historian and planned to go off teaching somewhere else.

But I went in the service, and when I got out of the army, I won a fellowship that brought me back to Columbia, to the university, and I then was offered a job with the history department, so I've been here ever since.

Felt like Br'er Rabbit and the briar patch.

- That's right.

What happens, the different books that you've written, in your studies and in your teaching, did you find voids that needed to be filled?

- Well, one of the biggest voids in studying South Carolina today is really the 20th century.

There's a tremendous amount of material in colonial South Carolina and a good bit on the antebellum period.

When you think about the various studies of slavery and of John C. Calhoun, the secession crisis, and even of the war itself, and there's some on Ben Tillman, not one of my real heroes, but the 20th century has just been almost totally neglected, and we've got a lot of folks and a lot of events that really need to be chronicled.

- Let's take a look, before we get into the new book, let's look at some of the other ones that you've done.

If you will, just run through some of these.

- Okay, just, "The Letterbook of Robert Pringle," that was my first in 1972.

It's a two-volume set of... this Charleston merchant's, what they call a letterbook.

Today we have file copies, but they kept a copy in a book, a bound book, of every letter he wrote around, literally around the world, he corresponded with folks around the world, and it's the earliest contemporary description of Charleston economic life.

So it's really fascinating, a self-made man.

And for a while I worked for about three years on this project of the "Biographical Directory "of the South Carolina House of Representatives."

This particular volume is the Colonial Commons House.

This contains sketches of all of our colonial legislators.

Something a little bit different I did, and you remember this 'cause you were here in Columbia when we had the program, and this is a collection of essays on Robert Penn Warren.

We call it "A Southern Renascence Man."

And in this one, we got scholars from all over the country to come in and talk about this great southern author.

It's literature, not history, but in southern studies, I do a little bit of everything.

- [Patti] And this one on the WPA project?

- [Walter] "The WPA Guide," probably one of the best descriptions of South Carolina that's ever been written.

- [Patti] Mm-hmm.

These others, "Columbia-" - These other.

- "Portrait of a City," - "Columbia: "Portrait of a City," I did with Deb Woolley, who used to work for the Columbia Record.

And this came out for Columbia's bicentennial in 1986.

And one of my personal favorites, it's what you asked me, what was an institutional history.

Earlier you study churches, corporations, any human endeavor that could be separately identified.

And let's look at the back, that back cover later- - Nice picture.

- [Walter] What most people do think about Santee Cooper is fishing, but Santee Cooper really transformed the face of the lower part of South Carolina.

And- - Then that brings us to the new one.

- [Walter] That brings us to the new one, "South Carolina in the Modern Age."

And I think this front cover really captures where we are today in 1991, 1993.

You've got the magnificent Kensington Plantation, which has been restored by Union Camp Corporation, in the foreground.

But in the back, the funding that made it possible is that multimillion-dollar paper mill.

- I like the very intriguing first line of your preface that you have.

You say, "South Carolina is one of the most fascinating, "yet most often misunderstood states in the union."

- I think people have an identity problem when it comes to South Carolina.

They... They look at the colonial or the antebellum past, and then, again, they neglect what has happened since then.

They really don't understand us.

They don't understand our economic condition either before or after the war.

They don't realize that, for example, South Carolina... really was a major player, not just on the American scene, but on the world scene prior to 1865.

What happened here made a difference.

In the colonial period, South Carolina was one of the jewels of the British Empire, the wealthiest mainland colony.

On a per capita basis, there was more money here than there was in New York or Massachusetts and even in some of the Caribbean colonies.

Of course, all that changed after 1865, because the basis for South Carolina's wealth was primarily in human capital.

And that's another story that's often misunderstood.

This state in 1860 was almost 60% Black, had the largest minority population of any state in the union, and that continued up until the 1920s.

And the way the white minority actually reacted to the Black majority has governed... how South Carolina evolved.

Whether it's economics, our politics, our society, our culture, the presence of Black Carolinians has had a tremendous impact on our history.

- Then what happened after the Civil War?

The state just sank almost into oblivion.

- Almost literally into oblivion.

Some historians have said the state went into a torpor from which it didn't wake till after World War II.

Part of it was economics.

The state just was terribly in debt.

Individuals were in debt.

They began to try to plant more and more cotton to make money, and everybody in the South was doing the same thing.

In the 1890s, we produced three times as much cotton as we did in 1860, but the price plummeted, so nobody had any money.

And on the national scene, South Carolina from being a leader... wasn't even considered.

We had no economic base.

We were a political outcast because the Civil War began here.

And people still, even today, when you go outside of South Carolina, that's one thing that people always remember is, the war started there.

So, South Carolinians, if they would just take a standard American history textbook and look at the references before 1860, you'll find South Carolina everywhere.

Afterwards, you will find more references in an American history textbook to Korea than you will to South Carolina.

- Well, prior to your book, there had not been a contemporary history of the state for many years.

- Right, the last one was by Professor Ernest Lander of Clemson, and he published his in 1965.

So it's been a quarter of a century since there has been a study of contemporary South Carolina.

- You've divided your book into four parts.

- Right, I've looked at four different eras in South Carolina history, and I was using outside events to make that break, not dividing it artificially from an internal basis.

And I look from Ben Tillman's first administration to World War I, the reelection of Woodrow Wilson, who many South Carolinians claim as their own 'cause he grew up here in Columbia.

And then the period between the wars, which I really find fascinating, when South Carolinians were looking to their past for some kind of sustenance and trying to cope with the Depression.

And then the period from World War II, the outbreak of World War II, to 1966, when we began to really enter the New South under a series of progressive governors like Fritz Hollings and Bob McNair.

And then the last 25 years, when the social and educational changes have been absolutely monumental.

- Well let's go back a little bit.

You have used songs in your book for historical sources.

- Yes.

- I know you're interested in music.

- I'm interested in music, and it's, South Carolina had a real fascination for the outside world.

Some of the most popular songs in the '20s and '30s, well, "A Little Bit South of North Carolina," which I don't like the title, but it's there.

"Carolina Moon," "Carolina on My Mind," all of these had to do with a yearning for being back in South Carolina.

And it's sort of ironic that these songs were coming out when South Carolinians, both Black and white, were migrating by the tens of thousands elsewhere.

And there's a common thread that runs through all of these songs.

And I've read the sheet music, so I know what the words say.

There's a rather romantic image of the Carolina home.

It might be a cabin.

In fact, there was one called "My Charleston Cabin," or it might be a shack, but there's always a rather bucolic rural setting.

And there's some kind of clinging vine involved.

It might be honeysuckle, it might be roses, it might be morning glories, but that's there.

And... there's always this longing about, "I want to go back to Carolina."

Of course, James Taylor did that in the 1970s.

- He says that's one of his favorite songs.

- That's right.

- Right.

You talk about a lot of the governors that have been in the state.

Governor Cole Blease, who was he, and was he as bad as we think he was?

- Well, Coley Blease was governor at the turn of the century.

He was a disciple of Ben Tillman, although they broke very early because Blease was a supporter of the factory workers.

And Tillman dismissed factory workers as "the damned factory class."

He thought anybody who worked in a building instead of on a farm was not worth his salt.

Blease, on the other hand, realizing that South Carolina was becoming industrialized between 1900 and 1910, was really a spokesman for these folks.

Now, he's been misunderstood, I think, because his rhetoric was just so nasty.

He was a horrible Negrophobe, blatant racist, a real rabble-rouser.

But if you're familiar with the literature of the period and you deal with naturalistic novels where individuals struggle against outside, ungovernable forces that are totally changing their lives and control their lives, in many ways, the situation in South Carolina fits that description, and Blease was a voice for the voiceless.

I'm not saying that what he said was necessarily good, but if you look at him from a little bit different light, he didn't go into politics for his own benefit.

And espousing the working class was not the way to win friends and influence people in South Carolina, where being in farming was very important.

It's interesting that we talk about how bad our voting rate is in South Carolina, and it's not very good even today.

But anytime Cole Blease was in a race, it was the highest percentage of eligible voters that this state has ever had.

You either hated him or you loved him, and his supporters and his detractors went to the polls and voted.

- There's an illustration in your book I'd like for you to show us, has to do with Blease.

- Oh, yes.

The first political cartoon that... appeared in a newspaper in South Carolina... shows... Cole Blease as a vulture and South Carolina trying to defend her virtue and honor against this evil individual.

Many people credit this cartoon, which appeared in "The State" newspaper, as ensuring Blease's election because it was so vicious.

It wasn't any more vicious than anything Blease said on the stump, but somehow seeing it in print just turned a lot of people off.

- [Patti] Mmm, wow.

Okay.

I guess since we're talking about Tillman, let's talk about him a little bit, Pitchfork Ben Tillman.

- Pitchfork Ben Tillman, not one of my heroes, but he's a man that has to be reckoned with if you look at South Carolina history.

He did many things.

He is responsible for our present 1895 Constitution, which we've been trying so desperately to reform in the last five years.

He was responsible for establishing segregation as the law of the land in South Carolina, again using that same 1895 constitution.

And he did do some good things.

Our friends up the road at Winthrop and Clemson, he established those schools.

He also established State College in Orangeburg, not for any particularly benign reason, but because he wanted to segregate Black students from white students.

But he was responsible for the founding of State College as well.

So he really created three colleges in South Carolina where before, three more, when there had only been USC and The Citadel.

- So you found some people you could like and others that you didn't quite like?

- Well, that's right, and I always tell my students, for example, that I'm not a Ben Tillman fan because I don't want them to think when I go in and talk about Tillman and say something that may be derogatory, that this is coming just strictly from a neutral position.

I try to be neutral, I try to look at everybody from both sides.

But Ben Tillman really is the cause of most of our modern ills, because along with that discrimination, for example, when he put Black voters, kept them from the polls, disenfranchised them, he also completely undid the public school system at that state, which was funding Black and white education on almost an equal basis.

And he got the constitution rigged so that you didn't have to provide money to educate Black South Carolinians, and we're still paying the price for that.

- Yeah.

You mentioned the out-migrating earlier, when did that stop?

When did people stop leaving the state?

- Really in the 1960s is when it began to reverse.

And over the last quarter of a century, you have... expatriate Carolinians beginning to come back into the state, particularly Black Carolinians who went north to work have come back home to retire in South Carolina.

- Hmm, interesting.

Then tourism too, that's one thing that we think is new now, attracting people to the state, but really it's not so new.

- No, in fact, we really began to push it in the 1920s.

And I have a passage here I can read- - Yes, that would be terrific.

- If you would like me to.

"In 1923, Governor Thomas McLeod "actually had a conference of community leaders "from across the state to, "'Let's get together to see what we can do for tourism.'

"And as you said, it was not a new idea in the 1920s.

"In fact, since the turn of the century, "South Carolina resorts "such as Aiken, Camden, and Summerville "had been frequented by well-to-do northerners "en route to and from Florida.

"Ordinary tourists, however, "needed something to do and to see, "so communities created attractions.

"Columbia came up with the Palmafesta, "which was our answer to Mardi Gras.

"Spartanburg had an annual music festival, "and Charleston launched its Azalea Festival.

"Folly Beach held a beauty pageant in 1928 "looking to what was going on in Atlantic City, "in which contestants were judged on the basis "of complexion, hair, teeth, figures, and personality.

"Now, while most Carolinians welcomed tourists, "W. W. Ball, the editor of the 'News and Courier,' did not.

"He wrote, 'Nothing is more dreadful than tourists, "'for the grasshoppers, boll weevils, "'or money-bagged bipeds.'

"Now privately, the editor of the 'News and Courier' "might have equated tourists with a deadly pestilence, "but in print he championed the cause "of historic preservation in Charleston, "which created an allure as attractive to tourists "as a cotton square was to boll weevils."

(Patti laughing) - Interesting what you found, huh?

- Yes.

It's part of the fascination of South Carolina.

- Exactly.

What about the rivalry between North Carolina and South Carolina?

When did all that start?

- Well, it goes all the way back to the 17th century when South Carolina was the dominant partner in... what became the two colonies of Carolina.

We initially, of course, were settled as one colony, with Charleston as the capital.

But as early as 1690, the division began to become apparent.

And by the turn of the 18th century, the Lords Proprietors were referring to the northern part of the province of Carolina.

So, the name Carolina really has historically always belonged to what we now call South Carolina.

The North Carolinians have always come a little bit later, much to their chagrin.

And, of course, they have to deal with the image of South Carolina prior to the Civil War as this center of wealth, opulence, culture, and what have you, whereas it was culture versus agriculture.

- And you say that outside of this area, other parts of the country, were known as the Carolinas still.

- As the Carolinas, and even the most educated American might think Charleston is in North Carolina or Raleigh is in South Carolina.

They just have no conception of the Carolinas as being anything other than this lump on the Eastern Seaboard.

- Hmm.

Let's look at some of the photographs in your book.

- Okay.

- You have some unusual ones.

Did you have trouble finding pictures?

- No, that is one of the beauties of studying the 20th century and the fact that there are some marvelous photograph collections right here in Columbia at the South Caroliniana Library.

The historical society in Charleston has a tremendous collection.

And then we've got some great little county museums over in Lexington and down in St.

Matthews, over in Florence, that have really super photograph collections.

Since we're on the State House grounds, we might wanna start here with what the State House looked like from 1865 until the turn of this century, just sort of a roofed-over barn.

- [Patti] Hard to believe.

- Well, the state didn't have the money.

We simply did not have the money to go forward with the grand design.

In fact, the State House with the dome, as we now know it, is not the way the State House was originally designed.

And I would hope, since we're going to spend a lot of money on restoring the State House the next few years that we think about following through with the original plan, which calls for a magnificent Renaissance spire instead of a dome that's too small for the building.

This one on the, on the right here, it just shows a farm family down in Pelion.

It looks like really a very pleasant life, but these folks were doing everything.

They had a sawmill.

They had a cotton gin.

These stobs in the foreground might not look like anything, but they hold a pipe that carried water up to the Seaboard railroad line.

They sold water to the railroad, which of course steam engines, you had to stop and have water.

So these folks in the countryside were real entrepreneurs.

And relatively speaking, this family was well off.

But if you'll notice in the background, their home is not anything magnificent, it's just a country farmhouse.

Called Sycamore Slopes.

- [Patti] Okay.

- [Walter] And here, on the left, you've got an aerial view of Charleston in the 1920s, and you can see that historic preservation really hadn't taken hold yet.

- [Patti] That's right.

Well a lot of work to be done.

- [Walter] A lot of work to be done.

A personal favorite of mine, and that is the composition.

This photograph was done during the 1930s, and here you have a man at the farmer's market with his cabbages and his onions, very likely touting the fact that they came from the wonderful iodine state, because South Carolina did have iodine in the soil, and that was considered to be healthy in the '30s.

And this will really show you that historic preservation in Charleston had a long way to go.

This is the magnificent Heyward-Washington House.

- Wow.

- Right down there near Catfish Row of "Porgy and Bess" fame.

A rather rare photograph from the South Caroliniana Library.

This shows Mayesville native Mary McLeod Bethune, one of the great educators in the 20th century, back in South Carolina, addressing a local high school down in the Beaufort area.

Of course, Dr.

Bethune made her reputation in Florida with Bethune-Cookman College, but she came back almost annually to talk to young Black men and women, to inspire them to go on to college, to do something for themselves.

- You spend a lot of time, Walter, on education in your book and talking about the innovative things that have been done in the state.

Are we that innovative here?

- We have done a number of things that really are innovative, and I think beginning back in the 1960s, the most innovative thing we did then was the tech system.

That really was absolutely unheard of anywhere else in the country.

And we've spent most of our money and our innovation in the last 20 years on pre-higher education, on things like Head Start, creating the Educational Finance Act so that all school districts would offer a minimum core of subjects to students.

And then, of course, the EIA, which was designed to fine-tune our educational system.

We are considered an innovator by the outside world.

We have gotten very good marks, but it just takes time.

Some people think, well, after two years, the EIA should have raised SAT scores by 50 points and all of that.

You can't change 100 years of neglect overnight, and we are coping with one of Ben Tillman's legacies.

- You have to consider the history and also the great, the long way we had to come back.

- Well, the long way we have to come back.

And you also need to remember that we are a poor state.

We are a poor state.

- Is there any favorite character or piece of history in your book?

- I guess, for better or for worse, I can't ignore Ben Tillman, he's not my favorite, but really he sets the stage for our 20th-century South Carolina.

I learned a lot about some folks who are dropped from the history book these days.

Kelly Miller, who was a Black educator who came from South Carolina.

In fact, the whole group of expatriates who left here, Black and white, to make something of themselves because there were no opportunities in South Carolina.

The Swearingen Center here in Columbia at the university, of course, is named for John Swearingen, whose father was Ben Tillman's state superintendent of education.

But John Swearingen got his engineering degree and left South Carolina and, of course, made his fame in the oil industry outside the state.

But he's just one of lots of folks in business and entertainment and sports who left South Carolina because of lack of opportunity.

- What about changes since World War II in the different areas, business, agriculture, education?

Which ones have had the greatest impacts, do you think?

- I think probably, it's, oh gosh, we're looking at a triad.

No question, the social changes with desegregation, that has been the biggest significant change in South Carolina, the most significant, because there are no longer artificial barriers.

There may be, in some cases, lack of opportunity, but that lack of opportunity would also apply to white Carolinians today as well.

The fact that we have become a fairly industrialized state, that's a change.

And then what we've done to try to improve ourselves educationally.

- [Patti] Mm-hmm.

Go ahead.

- So I was going to say, you know, they really all sort of go hand in hand.

I mean, these changes began just coming, just one right after the other.

But the biggest change of South Carolina has been the social change.

- Is there any other passage you'd like to read?

- Well, there are, there are two.

One has to do with... the music, and the perception of South Carolina outside the state at that time.

"In 1930, the president of "the American Association of Geographers "cautioned his profession to learn "to distinguish myth from reality "in examining the American South.

"Then he went on to say that "examining pre-Civil War South Carolina, "he'd found little difference between modern myth "and antebellum reality.

"There were innumerable movies with romantic southern themes "filmed during the '20s and '30s, "however, only one, appropriately entitled 'Carolina,' "was set in the state.

"In the 1934 film, Janet Gaynor and Robert Young "fall in love amidst a memory-filled plantation "where a grand Civil War ball is being enacted.

"And, of course, there is the reference to South Carolina "in 'Gone with the Wind,' "when Rhett Butler leaves Scarlett there at the end.

"She said, 'Where are you going?'

"He said, 'I'm going back to Charleston, '"because only there had grace and charm survived.'"

Now, we talked about the songs, and we mentioned "Carolina Moon," "Carolina in the Morning."

"These were laments by individuals "away from their Carolina homes, "and perhaps it was coincidence, "but these songs appeared at a time "when Carolinians by the tens of thousands were leaving, "living in northern urban environments "about as different from rural South Carolina "as you could get.

"And on a blustery December evening, "somebody living on the South Side of Chicago "or anywhere in Buffalo "might really remember his Charleston cabin as heaven.

"Locally written songs such as 'Moonbeams on the Strand' "and 'The Azalea Waltz' tended to be a bit treacly.

"Nevertheless, when taken as part of the total picture, "it's no wonder that visitors and natives "sometimes were guilty of conjuring up visions "of what one author misstated as a 'chameleon-scented past,'" because as we all know, chameleons have no scent.

- [Patti] There's much good reading in your book.

It's "South Carolina in the Modern Age."

Walter Edgar, thanks for being with us.

- Thank you, Patti, my pleasure.

- From the State House grounds in Columbia, I'm Patti Just.

(pleasant guitar music)