Yale Historical Review an Undergraduate Publication Fall 2017
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THE YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW AN UNDERGRADUATE PUBLICATION FALL 2017 THE YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW AN UNDERGRADUATE PUBLICATION The Yale Historical Review provides undergraduates an opportunity to have their exceptional work highlighted and FALL 2017 ISSUE encourages the diffusion of original historical ideas on college VOLUME VII campuses by providing a forum for outstanding undergraduate ISSUE I papers covering any historical topic. The Yale Historical Review Editorial Board Yale gratefully acknowledges the following donors: Jacob Wasserman Greg Weiss FOUNDING PATRONS Annie Yi Association of Yale Alumni Weili Cheng For past issues and information regarding submissions, Department of History, Yale University advertisements, subscriptions, and contributions please Matthew and Laura Dominski visit our website: Jeremy Kinney and Holly Arnold Kinney In Memory of David J. Magoon HISTORICALREVIEW.YALE.EDU Sareet Majumdar Brenda and David Oestreich Or visit our Facebook page: The Program in Judaic Studies, Yale University WWW.FACEBOOK.COM/ South Asian Studies Council, YALEHISTORICALREVIEW Yale University Stauer With further questions or to provide Undergraduate Organizations Committee feedback, please email us at: Derek Wang Yale Club of the Treasure Coast Yale European Studies Council [email protected] Zixiang Zhao Or write to us at: FOUNDING CONTRIBUTORS Council on Latin American and Iberian THE YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW Studies at Yale 33 DIXWELL AVENUE, #209 Peter Dominski YALE UNIVERSITY J.S. Renkert NEW HAVEN, CT 06511 Joe and Marlene Toot Yale Center for British Art The Yale Historical Review is published by Yale Club of Hartford Yale students. Yale University is not Yale Council on Middle East Studies responsible for its content. CONTRIBUTORS American Historical Association Department of the History of Art, Yale University The Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program at Yale Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations Department at ON THE COVER An oat field in Georgia. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott, courtesy of the Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017877344/ EDITOR IN CHIEF COPY EDITORS EDITORIAL Katie Shy, TC '19 Serena Cho, MC '21 Saumya Malhotra, MC '21 BOARD MANAGING EDITOR Matthew Sáenz, DC '21 Ishaan Srivastava, MY '19 PRODUCTION AND SENIOR EDITORS DESIGN EDITORS Max Norman, TD '17 Vanessa Chung, SM '20 Christine Wang, SY '18 Avital Smotrich-Barr, TD '19 Mark Gustaferro, SM '20 DEVELOPMENT CHAIRS ASSOCIATE EDITORS Keera Annamaneni, TD '20 Emma Hastings, TD '18 Alan Liu, TC '21 Heidi Katter, SM '20 Alyssa Knapp, SY '18 WEB DEVELOPMENT CHAIR Sally Ma, MY '21 Henry Jacob, SY '21 Adrian Rivera, JE '20 David Stevens, BK '19 DAVID BLIGHT ADVISORY Class of 1954 Professor of American History; Director of the Gilder Leh- BOARD rman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition BRUCE GORDON Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History JOHN GADDIS Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History BEVERLY GAGE Professor of History GLENDA GILMORE Peter V. & C. Vann Woodward Professor of History JAY GITLIN Lecturer of History; Associate Director of the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Sutudy of Frontiers and Borders STEVEN PINCUS Bradford Durfee Professor of History; Co-Director of the Center for His- torical Enquiry and the Social Sciences NORMA THOMPSON Director of Undergraduate Studies for Humanities LETTER FROM THE EDITORS The Yale Historical Review rarely declares Northern politicians through the critical peri- an issue to have a theme. We get excellent od in which pellagra, a disease caused by mal- submissions from so many places that any nutrition, emerged in the South. The public coherence among them can seem like a mat- health issue becomes a battleground for de- ter of chance. But you’re opening our South- fining the present and future of the South, ern issue today because our board is excited and Woodall skillfully traces the several mo- about a grouping of papers that truly shed tives of the lawmakers involved. light on each other, whose collection has illu- We finish with an interview with Pro- minated both networks of new inquiries and fessor Glenda Gilmore, Yale’s Southern his- broader shared curiosities. The papers herein torian. Professor Gilmore’s expertise ranges investigate the ways in which the South—and far and wide, and her love of teaching only questions in dialogue with the history of the makes her work more exciting. The conversa- region—has evolved, almost never logically tion, a fascinating tour through her education or at pace, almost never to a neat solution. and career and hopes for the future, fittingly These investigations get at enduring con- guides us in processing the complexity intro- tradictions in our country, and inspire us to duced above. learn. As we reflect on the past, we remain We open with Emily Xiao’s examination grateful for the work of our editors, and for of maps created after the Chicago race riot the kindly given time of our contributors of 1919, a subtle exploration of an effort to and professors. Thank you to those gener- both unearth and ameliorate racial tensions. ous enough to share their papers with us and While set outside our region of focus, Xiao’s with others. We hope you enjoy these papers careful scholarship deals with an issue which as we have enjoyed preparing them, and that haunts the pieces that follow. you come away reflecting on our past but also Describing a century of intellectual ef- looking to our future. forts to marry Southern traditional values with an appeal to at least the majority of the country, Daniel Judt’s investigation of under- Sincerely, represented currents in Southern thought provides nuanced insight into the psyche of Katie Shy, Editor in Chief the region. Ishaan Srivastava, Managing Editor Ethan Young’s essay on the integration of football in Knoxville, TN goes right to the issue of the Southern psyche by focalizing a ritual we all hold dear. His excellent look at the progress at the University of Tennessee captures an entire city’s passage through a fraught and violent era, and clearly and pow- erfully telescopes into our present day. Angelo Pis-Dudot captures a different pe- riod of change, taking us to Puerto Rico as the island began governing itself. Another examination of a specific region’s relationship to and dependence on the rest of the United States, this work convincingly highlights the challenges of modernization in such a case. Finally, James Wyatt Woodall probes the tension between Southern businessmen and CONTENTS A CITY WITHIN A CITY 5 The Chicago Commission on Race Relations and Its Maps of Black Chicago Emily Xiao THE FORGOTTEN STRAND 31 Socialism in the Southern Conservative Tradition, 1850–1950 Daniel Judt MOVE THE CHAINS 55 Football and Integration in Knoxville, Tennessee 1950–1980 Ethan Young 82 MODERNIZING THE COLONIAL CITY Operation Bootstrap and Urbanization in San Juan, Puerto Rico Angelo Pis-Dudot THE ESSENTIAL DENIAL OF PELLAGRA IN THE NEW SOUTH 100 The Disease That Said Too Much James Wyatt Woodall AN INTERVIEW WITH GLENDA GILMORE 117 Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History Conducted by Serena Cho EMMA PLATOFF A CITY WITHIN A CITY THE CHICAGO COMMISSION ON RACE RELATIONS AND ITS MAPS OF BLACK CHICAGO During the interwar years of the twentieth century, Chicago, like many northern American cities, experienced profound social change and prolonged racial strife as a result of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North. Af- ter one particularly violent incident in this dramatic history, the Chicago race riot of 1919, a Chicagoan Commission on Race Relations was formed from black and white community members to examine the underlying causes of, and potential solutions to, this racial tension. In this paper, Emily Xiao, JE ’18, reveals how the Commission’s singularly impressive use of accurate maps in its culminating report served as a politi- cal instrument to advance a pro-integration argument. In demonstrating the impor- tance of spatial representations of social and cultural issues, Xiao points out a larger phenomenon: subjective arguments can be found even in the seemingly objective. By Emily Xiao, JE ’18 Written for “Cartography, Territory, Identity" Professor Bill Rankin Faculty Advisor: Professor Cynthia Horan Edited by Emma Hastings, Mark Gustaferro, and Matthew Sáenz 5 A CITY WITHIN A CITY Chicago is the known city; perhaps more is known about it, how it is run, how it kills, how it loves, steals, helps, gives, cheats, and crushes than any other city in the world.1 —RICHARD WRIGHT, 1945 On a scorching hot Sunday in late July, during what would become known as the Red Summer of 1919, a riot broke out at Chicago’s 29th Street Beach. A black boy named Eugene Williams had drifted across an invisible line in the water dividing the “white” and “black” swimming areas. White youths spotted Williams from shore and hurled stones at him, causing the seventeen-year-old to drown. Within hours, a destructive riot—sparked by the police’s refusal to arrest the white man who had instigated the stoning—was in full sway. It lasted from July 27 to August 8, with the majority of violence against people and property concentrated in Chicago’s “Black Belt” on the South Side. By the time the violence subsided and the state militia withdrew, 537 people had been injured and 38 people had died, 28 of whom were black. On August 1, the city’s civic and business leaders gathered at Chicago’s prestigious Union League Club and drafted a letter to Illinois Governor Frank Lowden, urging that he appoint an “emergency state committee to study the psychological, social, and economic causes underlying the conditions resulting in the present race riot.”2 In response, Governor Lowden formed the Commission on Race Relations, which was led by twelve prominent Chicagoans—six white men and six black men.