TO LIVE AND DINE IN DIXIE: FOODWAYS AND CULTURE IN THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOUTH by ANGELA JILL COOLEY KARI FREDERICKSON, COMMITTEE CHAIR GEORGE C. RABLE LISA LINDQUIST-DORR JOHN M. GIGGIE GRACE ELIZABETH HALE A DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the Graduate School of The University of Alabama TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA 2011 Copyright Angela Jill Cooley 2011 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the transformation of food culture in urban areas of the American South during the first part of the twentieth century. From 1900 to 1964, southern culinary practices became more public and more in line with national trends. The first three decades of the twentieth century marked an important period of change. In southern homes, white, middle-class, urban women formed a commitment to scientific cooking and used its strict rules to construct new racial and class identities within the urban environment. At the same time, newly urban peoples began frequenting a variety of different types of public eating places. Socio-economic, racial, ethnic, and gender diversity within these spaces encouraged the white power structure in southern cities to implement laws to regulate these public spaces. Such regulation included municipal ordinances that restricted eating places based on race and contributing to the development of a system of racial segregation within the region’s urban areas. White southerners maintained racial segregation in public eating places through images and everyday rituals that identified the black consumption of food as subordinate to white consumption. At the height of Jim Crow, however, southern consumption culture also cultivated the seeds of segregation’s destruction. Segregated black cafes stimulated African American community building and empowerment, both of which served to undermine the strength of segregation. At the same time, as southern food practices became more entwined with national standards, food systems emerged and spread across the South that encouraged more democratized spaces for the consumption of food. The nationalization of southern food culture, the determined efforts of civil rights activists to end segregated eating patterns, and the continued ii intransigence of white supremacists to maintain racial segregation in food venues encouraged the United States Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which, among other things, required the desegregation of public eating places. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I appreciate the many institutions that have provided financial support. The History Department at the University of Alabama offered many years of assistance through fellowships, assistantships, Honor’s Day awards, travel funds, and adjunct teaching positions. The Graduate School provided travel funds to attend conferences and financed my first year of work on this dissertation with a Graduate Council fellowship. The Bankhead family and the Teaching American History Program funded grants that allowed me to pursue a Ph.D. and to gain valuable research and teaching experience. In particular, I would like to thank Kari Frederickson, ZuZu Freyer, and Lisa Lindquist-Dorr for selecting me to participate in these programs. The Clements Library at the University of Michigan assisted with travel funds to review their excellent culinary collection in Ann Arbor. The Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Montevallo offered adjunct teaching opportunities that provided funding and broadened my teaching repertoire. I am indebted to James S. Day, Clark E. Hultquist, Ruth Truss, Amanda Fox, and Stacia Love for their assistance and support during my time at Montevallo. I am also indebted to many institutions and individuals for their help in the research and writing of this dissertation. The Interlibrary Loan librarians at Gorgas Library at the University of Alabama facilitated the acquisition of many important resources. Lee E. Pike at the Angelo Bruno Business Library at the University of Alabama located and requested certain business records. I want to thank John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, for providing research help, positive feedback on my work, and, along with Ted Ownby, the incentive to bring this dissertation to a conclusion. I am grateful to committee members Kari Frederickson, George iv C. Rable, Lisa Lindquist-Dorr, John M. Giggie, and Grace Elizabeth Hale for their close reading of this dissertation and their valuable suggestions on how to improve my work. In particular, Dr. Frederickson, Dr. Rable, and Dr. Lindquist-Dorr have been an important part of my education from my first day in graduate school. I want to thank them for shepherding me through the demanding process of becoming a historian. I have also received the support and encouragement of many faculty, staff members, and students at the University of Alabama, but I want to recognize Kay Branyon, Fay Wheat, and Ellen Moon in the History Department office because they have always been helpful, knowledgeable, and cheerful. The most important people in my life are my family. I thank my siblings, niece, nephew, grandmother, and extended family for the innumerable ways that they have demonstrated their love and support over the years. To my parents, however, I extend my most genuine appreciation for providing me with food, shelter, assistance, advice (solicited and otherwise), and, above all, unconditional love. I thank my mother for helping to proofread this dissertation. I thank my father for his immortal words of wisdom, “Study hard, study good,” which my entire family has now taken to heart. I also want to thank Jon. I am sure that he has tired of listening to me provide a cultural analysis of every meal we have eaten since I started this dissertation, but I appreciate his friendship, advice, and love. v CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………...…...……….……….ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………..….………………….iv INTRODUCTION: Steaming Fried Chicken and Other “Sacrilege”: Food Practices in the Twentieth-Century South.…………………………………………………………………..….….1 CHAPTER ONE: New South, New Food: Transforming Southern Food Culture........................20 CHAPTER TWO: “Autocrats of [the] Dinner Table”: The White Southern Middle Class and Restaurant Culture………………………………………………………….................................60 CHAPTER THREE: “A First-Class Lunch in Every Respect”: Cafes, Lunch Rooms, and Public Eating Places as Sites of Cultural Conflict…………………………………………..............…105 CHAPTER FOUR: Eating Jim Crow: African American Eating Practices in the Twentieth- Century South……………………………………………………………………………….….150 CHAPTER FIVE: Making the McSouth: Southern Foodways in National Culture……….…..192 CHAPTER SIX: “The Customer is Always ‘White’”: Racial Purity and the Civil Rights Movement………………………………………………………………………………………228 CONCLUSION: Cooking up Controversy: Contemporary Discourses on Southern Foodways……………………………………………………………………………………….258 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………267 vi INTRODUCTION: Steaming Fried Chicken and Other “Sacrilege”: Food Practices in the Twentieth-Century South In 1955, Mary R. Wheeler of Waynesboro, Virginia, wrote an angry letter to the editor of Life magazine complaining that the southern fried chicken recipe included in an earlier issue was not “authentic.” The recipe in question instructed readers to simmer the chicken in water for thirty minutes before serving. One word summed up Wheeler’s reaction to the notion of steaming fried chicken: “sacrilege.” The editor responded to Wheeler’s complaint by assuring its readers, “Life’s fried chicken, the specialty of a real southern cook, is both authentic and crisp.”1 Wheeler’s concern that the national magazine might misrepresent a dish as important to the southern consciousness as fried chicken symbolizes a broader concern about the effect of an increasingly national culture on ways of life deemed to be particularly southern. Food culture offers a good vehicle for examining this phenomenon because food has, and has always had, a proprietary nature. Like Wheeler, individual cooks take ownership over dishes that can be prepared in a variety of ways and adopt one method of preparation that is considered to be proper. Individual restaurants, although preparing and serving essentially the same menu as their competitors, mark their own dishes and recipes as special and exclusive. Localities, states, regions, even nations lay claim to foods, recipes, and drinks as “traditional” dishes impervious to the vagaries of time or fashion. 1 “Recipes that Generations of Cooks Have Sworn By,” Life, January 3, 1955, 65; Mary R. Wheeler, letter to the editor, Life, January 24, 1955, 8. 1 Foodways, however, are not so unyielding. Practices associated with the provision, preparation, service, and consumption of food tend to change along with society, culture, economics, technology, and consumer tastes, to name only a few factors. Depending upon her age, Wheeler may have witnessed significant changes in food practices even in the small Shenandoah community of Waynesboro. The first half of the twentieth century represented a significant period of change in the ways that southerners obtained, cooked, consumed, and thought about the foods they ate. In many ways, these changes reflected broader technological, economic, political, social, and cultural shifts. Both Wheeler’s willingness to consult Life magazine for recipes and her disdain that the national periodical