In this Virginia History Blog, we consider New South and Modern Virginia part two, looking at titles on its economies and environment, and then biographies from the period.
Economy and Environment in the New South and Modern Virginia. “The New Economy and the New South”, “The Oyster Question” looks at fisheries in the Chesapeake Bay, “Managing the Mountains” traces federal land management since the New Deal, and “Historic Virginia Gardens” describes household ornamental restoration.
Biographies in the New South and Modern Virginia. Three titles are concerned with “Woodrow Wilson” from Princeton President to U.S. President, “Woodrow Wilson and the Great War” on World War I, and “The President and His Biographer” describing Wilson and R.S. Baker. “The Life of Richard E. Byrd” is on the arctic explorer, “William Barron Rogers and the Idea of MIT” is on its Virginia born president, and “The Photographic Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnston” commemorates the Virginian photographer.
Economy and Environment in the New South and Modern Virginia
The New Economy and the Modern South
Michael Dennis wrote The New Economy and the Modern South in 2009. It is available from the University Press of Florida, on Kindle and online new and used. Buy “The New Economy and the Modern South” on Amazon here.
Dennis develops a critique of Virginia’s political economy based on an 1890s Populist critique of industrial capitalism, then applies it to economic development in northern Virginia in the go-go 1980s and 1990s to draws conclusions that are very critical of “neo-liberal” policies of Republicans and moderate Democrats.
In the modern era, Virginia’s economy became more global in a shift away from traditional manufacturing to information and technology and services. State and local government officials attracted new companies relocating to Virginia to create jobs. The businesses were attracted by a more profitable environment underwritten by government subsidies, deregulation and tax breaks, right-to-work labor and business-friendly attitudes. Personal income per capita in Virginia was highest in the South and twelfth in the nation. Dennis draws the conclusion that benefits were not evenly distributed in the state or among the working class from the New Economy’s “free” market. And it created liabilities for most workers in the workplace, even in the burgeoning areas. Downsizing in full time employment for mid-level office managers, low level office workers, and high tech programmers resulted in large-scale temporary employment and worker alienation for both blue-collar and white-collar workers.
The state as a whole grew rapidly, scoring well on indicators such as job creation, per capital income growth, average wages and unemployment all of which exceeded national averages until the downturn of 2007 and the “great recession”. The “new economy” in its boom years brought about greater economic inequality along with increasing numbers of people who found restrictions on their potential in the workplace. The shortcomings of the “Silicon Dominion” established in the urban corridor from northern Virginia to Richmond and from Charlottesville to Hampton Roads, included surplus workers in declining industries and economically troubled communities in Southside and southwestern Virginia.
Buy “The New Economy and the Modern South” on Amazon here. Also by this author, Luther P. Jackson and a Life for Civil Rights in Virginia (2004). See also David L. Carlton The South, The Nation, and The World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development (2003), Andy Ambrose and Craig Pascoe editors, The American South in the Twentieth Century (2005), and James C. Cobb Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877-1984 (2004).
The Oyster Question
Christine Keiner wrote The Oyster Question: Scientists, Watermen, and the Maryland Chesapeake Bay since 1880 in 2009. It is available from the University of Georgia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Buy “The Oyster Question” on Amazon here.
States have always had more control over their natural resources than the federal government. As early as 1820, Maryland outlawed the introduction of mechanical“dredging” in the oyster beds of the Chesapeake Bay. Instead, the artisan craft of fisherman“tonging”was required. After the Civil War, dredging was allowed, the popularity of oysters exploded, and Gilded Age industrial pollution increased. Additional harvests transplanted Bay oysters to out-of-state beds, and the Maryland “Oyster Navy” could not enforce state environmental laws. During the 1884-1885 oyster season, Maryland watermen harvested 15,000,000 bushels, but in 2004-2005 it was 26,500 bushels.
Over that century, the oyster industry, the Bay ecology and scientific knowledge, all changed dramatically. One narrative describes the “tragedy of the commons” brought on by industry self-interested over-harvesting. But the Bay is also under assault from newly imported diseases, and two hundred invasive species from foreign waters. There are now dead zones imposed by suburban and agriculturally polluted runoff that destroys all fish and shellfish. Since the late 20th century, oystermen and preservationists seek to subsidize, restore and maintain an open yet regulated public commons in the face of opposition from growing corporate control of natural resources.
There have been several contentious constituencies in this history. Watermen insist on independent family owned subsistence. Unrealistic advocates of scientific management promoted new private investment, ignoring traditional waterman lore that had restricted size and mechanization of the harvest. Suburban and waterfront homeowners objected to noisy working waterfronts and opposed subsidies for fisherman. Keiner emphasizes the importance of local government protection and promotion of the oyster beds and their use. While local judges and juries often continue to support local oystermen, the landscape of state and local politics was fundamentally changed with one-man-one-vote reapportionment. Oysters have been reduced to a symbol of Chesapeake ecosystem health rather than the basis of a viable full time occupation.
Buy “The Oyster Question” on Amazon here. See also Howard R. Ernst Chesapeake Bay Blues: Science, Politics and the Struggle to Save the Bay (2003), Garrett Hardin and John Baden Managing the Commons (1977, 1998), Drew A. Swanson A Golden Weed: Tobacco and Environment in the Piedmont South (2014), and his Beyond the Mountains: Commodifying Appalachian Environments (2018).
Managing the Mountains
Sara M. Gregg wrote Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia in 2010. It is available from the Yale University Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Buy “Managing the Mountains” on Amazon here. See also James R. Skillen Federal Ecosystem Management: Its Rise, Fall, and Afterlife (2015).
This book of forest, farming and recreation analysis studies the first three decades of the twentieth century in Appalachia, and the federal government’s role in its affairs. It centers on a comparative study between the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and the Green Mountains of Vermont where the federal government was required to purchase lands out of the private domain to preserve them. In Virginia, the state advanced federal and state interests by exercising its eminent domain powers, newly enforced for conservation and recreation purposes by the New South Byrd Progressives, and that left its local mountain farmers out of political discussions. In Vermont, the local farmers were engaged in town hall meetings and the state served as a check on federal initiatives.
Gregg highlights the contests between comprehensive planning in forest, farming and recreation versus local social, political and economic concerns. The federal government emerged from 1911 to the 1930s as a powerful land-use planner for both public and private lands by buying private property to place in the public domain. The region was transformed from primarily extraction industry related to lumber to an increasingly conservation and recreation minded focus.
Buy “Managing the Mountains” on Amazon here. See also Mary Beth Pudup Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century (1995), and Connie Park Rice Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism (2015).
Historic Virginia Gardens
Margaret Page Bemiss and Roger Foley wrote Historic Virginia Gardens: Preservation Work of the Garden Club of Virginia, 1975-2007. Available from the University of Virginia Press, Kindle and online new and used. Buy “Historic Virginia Gardens” on Amazon here.
Gardens have been an element of the dialogue between people and place throughout Virginia, and they have a place in the nation’s history. Each garden described in this book is also placed in the context of its era, historical influences and key characters. They are described in terms of their restoration, provenance of the plants and cultural cross-breeding.
Bemiss and Foley document the dynamic evolution of gardens and gardening as it relates to real estate and architecture, family genealogy and historical era. Garden Club archaeology included shining car headlights on old landscapes at night to locate the historical paths and beds. They identified previous shrubbery planting sites by noting the subtle differences in spring turf. These restorations complement the context and historical understanding of important figures such as Washington, Jefferson and Madison, Carter, Randolph, Lewis and Lee.
Buy “Historic Virginia Gardens” on Amazon here. See also Andrea Wulff The Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation (2012), Roger Foley Williamsburg’s Glorious Gardens (1996), and Mac Griswold Washington’s Gardens at Mount Vernon: Landscape of the Inner Man (1999), andLinda Jane Holden The Gardens of Bunny Mellon (incl. Upperville VA) (2018).
Biographies
Woodrow Wilson
A. Barksdale Maynard wrote Woodrow Wilson: Princeton to the Presidency in 2008. Available from the Yale University Press, Kindle and online new and used. Buy “Woodrow Wilson” on Amazon here.
Maynard’s thesis is that Wilson underwent a professional preparation for his U.S. presidency over twenty-five years as a student, professor and president of Princeton University. He was brilliant and headstrong, principled and stubborn. His influential Congressional Government (1885) emphasized the importance of political leadership in making and directing democratic institutions.
As a college president, he introduced a tutorial system of course curriculum to replace large lecture halls. But his reforms for a “quadrangle” system of dormitories integrating the white male students of differing social and economic backgrounds failed to break up the elitist undergraduate dining clubs. His administration was marked by personalized conflict and refusals to compromise, leading him to cut off personal friends and professional allies when they questioned his initiative. Still, the controversy redounded to Wilson’s national fame as a promoter of democratic principles. Likewise during his U.S. presidency, Wilson’s administration was marked by utopian proposals pursued without compromise that often lead to their failure – most notably that of the League of Nations.
Buy “Woodrow Wilson” on Amazon here. See also, John Milton Cooper, Jr. Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (2011), William Hazelgrove Madam President: The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson (2016), Phyllis Lee Levin Edith and Woodrow: The Wilson White House (2001), and Irwin Hood Hoover Forty-Two Years in the White House (1934).
Woodrow Wilson and the Great War
Robert W. Tucker wrote Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America’s Neutrality, 1914-1917 in 2007. Available from the University of Virginia Press, Kindle and online new and used. Buy “Woodrow Wilson and the Great War” on Amazon here.
Tucker focuses on the years of Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy of neutrality leading up to the U.S. entry into the European’s Great War (World War I). Wilsonian neutrality was not isolationism. Instead it was an insistence on the rights of international maritime trade – even at the risk of war. Wilson grounded his policy in that of President Thomas Jefferson in an attempt to maintain national honor, prestige and independence. That peacetime diplomacy failed to avert war both in 1812 and in 1914. The U.S. commercial entanglement with the Allies led to an acceptance of the British Blockade of Imperial Germany and opposition to its retaliatory submarine warfare.
While Wilson was convinced of the Great War’s essential amorality among the participants, he believed America to be the international beacon of freedom as a moral force in the world. He hoped that forestalling involvement would lead the belligerents to call upon the United States to orchestrate a new international order. When they fell into deadlock on the battlefield and still refused to request U.S. mediation, Wilson supposed that being on the winning side would allow the United States to foster an international community of like minded democratic states that maintained national sovereignty.
Buy “Woodrow Wilson and the Great War” on Amazon here. See also Kendricks A. Clements Woodrow Wilson: World Statesman (1999), Robert C. Hilderbrand Power and the People: Executive Management of Public Opinion in Foreign Affairs, 1897-1921 (1981), and Lisle A. Rose Power At Sea, Volume 1: The Age of Navalism, 1890-1918 (2006).
The President and His Biographer
Merrill D. Peterson wrote The President and His Biographer: Woodrow Wilson and Ray Stannard Baker in 2007. Available from the University of Virginia Press, Kindle and online new and used. Buy “The President and His Biographer” on Amazon here.
Baker describes Ray Stannard Baker and his writing the first major biography of Woodrow Wilson. Baker was a muckraking journalist progressive who also served in the Wilson administration as the press officer of the American Peace Commission in Paris. It begins with an assessment of Baker’s career, proceeds to an account of the Wilson administration through the eyes of Baker, and concludes with an assessment of the eight-volume official biography published in 1946.
About two-thirds of the book is devoted to the last ten years of Wilson’s life. Baker pictures Wilson as an eloquent and principled leader, an activist reformer of “genius and wisdom “ who assumed pragmatic leadership of the national Democratic Party and led it to presidential victory in two successive terms for the first time since Andrew Jackson. While Wilson’s leadership style was flawed by his reluctance to delegate, and marred by episodes of self-defeating rudeness and stubbornness, Baker held out Wilson out as a great world statesman, a martyr to the cause of world peace.
Buy “The President and His Biographer” on Amazon here. See also J. Michael Hogan Woodrow Wilson’s Western Tour: Rhetoric, Public Opinion, and the League of Nations (2006).
Explorer: Richard E. Byrd
Lisle Rose wrote Explorer: The Life of Richard E. Byrd in 2008. Available from the University of Missouri Press, Kindle and online new and used. Buy “Explorer: Richard E. Byrd” on Amazon here. A companion to Eugene Rodger Beyond the Barrier: the Story of Byrd’s First Expedition to Antarctica (1990, 2012).
The history of polar exploration in the early twentieth century is fraught with distortion and disagreement. Richard Byrd, Frederick Cook and Robert Peary were sponsored and promoted by rival media organizations. News and controversy has been generated both by distorted accounts of heroism and by rival speculations of de-construction.
Adventurer achievements are disputed by contending factions among both scientists and historians. Byrd’s celebrity campaign for exploration was underwritten by important figures in industry and finance, politics and military. They were publicized for the “Mayor of Antarctica” by the National Geographic Society, CBS radio, the New York Times, and Hollywood.
Rose depicts terrain, geological profiles, and meteorological phenomena of the polar regions, as well as detailing the challenges of navigation, aeronautics, and survival on the polar seas, in the frigid air and on the continental ice shelf.
Buy “Explorer: Richard E. Byrd” on Amazon here.
William Baron Rogers: MIT
A. J. Angulo wrote William Baron Rogers and the Idea of MIT in 2009. It is available from the Johns Hopkins University Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Buy “William Baron Rogers: MIT” on Amazon here.
As director of the Virginia Geological Survey in the 1835-1842, William Baron Rogers faced a General Assembly reluctant to fund his efforts to map Virginia’s mineral resources, but also a general skepticism that there could be a science of rocks. By the time of his death in 1882 as a founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Rogers had made a significant contribution to dramatic changes in America’s scientific landscape.
On leaving his career as a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Virginia, Rogers relocated to Massachusetts to promote his idea of an innovative institution of higher learning dedicated to the theoretical study of science supplemented by practical laboratory instruction. MIT was formally began incorporated in 1861 and began operating in 1865, with program areas in architecture, civil and mechanical engineering, chemistry and geology. Rogers contribution to science was not as a professor in the laboratory of scientific inquiry, but in his advancement of the professionalization of American science. He balanced research and theory with technology and practical application, organizing and serving as president in both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences.
Buy “William Baron Rogers: MIT” on Amazon here. See also Sean Patrick Adams The American Coal Industry 1790-1902 (2013), and Scientists and Swindlers: Consulting on Coal and Oil in America, 1820-1890 (2008). Also by this author, Empire and Education: A History of Greed and Goodwill from the War of 1898 to the War on Terror (2012).
Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnston
Maria Elizabeth Ausherman wrote The Photographic Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnston in 2009. Available from the University of Florida Press, Kindle and online new and used. Buy “Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnston” on Amazon here. See also Margaret Page Bemiss and Roger Foley Historic Virginia Gardens: Preservation Work of the Garden Club of Virginia (2009).
Frances Benjamin Johnston was one of the first professional American photographers, with a career spanning seventy years. In the late 1880s she began a career as a magazine illustrator. She opened a commercial portrait studio in 1893, authored publications and sponsored exhibitions of her work. Her work pictured the South as a civilized place with a distinctive regional cultural heritage, rooted in the colonial revival movement.
This book centers on Johnston’s work on a monumental survey of historic architecture and gardens that is important in the field of architectural history and historic preservation. She was motivated by the civic values of the City Beautiful movement, and extended her access to private gardens through a national network of garden clubs. The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities rebuilt Virginia’s colonial capitol on its foundation and served as an inspiration for Rockefeller’s restoration of Colonial Williamsburg. Throughout the Great Depression, Johnston received grants from the Carnegie Foundation to supported her work. That first effort to photograph a wide range of historic buildings served as a model for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) begun by the National Park Service in 1934.
Buy “Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnston” on Amazon here. See also Bettina Berch The Woman Behind the Lens: The Life and Work of Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1864-1952 (2000), Pete Daniel and Raymond Smock A Talent for Detail: The Photographs of Miss Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1889-1910 (1974), Denise Ankele Frances Benjamin Johnston:Woman Photographer — 40+ Photographic Reproductions (2011), Laura Wexler Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (2000).
TVH Era Webpage for Gilded Age, New South, 20th Century
The TVH webpage for Gilded Age, New South, 20th Century Eras, 1880-Present, features our top title picks taken from the bibliographies of three surveys of Virginia History’s 400 years.
The Table of Contents divides Political and Economic Virginia, 11880-Present into (a) Gilded Age to mid-20th century policy, and (b) Mid-20th century to present policy. Topical history is treated under headings of Social History, Gender in Virginia, and Religious Virginia.
African American Virginia, 1880-present is divided into (a) Jim Crow Virginia 1880-1950, and (b) Civil Rights Virginia, 1950-present. Finally, wars are featured under (1) Spanish American War, (2) World War I, (3) World War II, and (4) Cold War.
See Also
General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
Note: Insights for these reviews include those available from articles in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Civil War Era, the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.