The Limits of Post Colonialism: The Problem South and the Reality of Being a Poor White in the Age of Eugenics

Natalie J. Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).

Natalie J. Ring revises historical debates about the national understanding of the American South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to Ring, David Blight and others argue that “the powerful forces of sectional reunion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” redeemed the tumultuous Civil War and failed Reconstruction years.[1] Ring contends that the period was instead characterized by a widespread understanding of the region as problematic for the building up of a modern nation-state. As a result, the “Problem South” became the subject of social science-inspired efforts at reform and uplift. For Ring’s sources, including northern philanthropists, associations of southern liberals, and the federal government, the American South remained a region caught in a web of paradoxical relationships between nationalism, progress, regionalism, and poverty.

Ring’s postcolonial interpretation of this historical process is one to be wrestled with. She concedes that postcolonial and colonial studies become somewhat muddled in the context of the American South, a region that was both “the colonizer and the colonized.”[2] Using these frameworks with careful measure, Ring reveals that her sources socially mapped the region in such a way that the historian can situate it in the broader story of American imperialism. Her arguments are rooted in the sources’ understanding of the South as a parallel of other foreign geographical spaces. Their understanding is revealed by similar reform efforts in the south and in colonial countries.

The framework of post colonialism perhaps limits Ring’s story to certain historical sources and movements. Ring, however, might contend that her sources dictated the postcolonial interpretation. The fact remains that large elements of early twentieth-century American culture are left out of The Problem South. For instance, Ring focuses little on religion. She argues, “both northerners and liberal southerners viewed and referred to themselves as missionaries seeking to modernize the South and uplift poor whites and poor blacks.”[3] Although she is discussing social reformers and political groups, Ring’s language is reminiscent of the religious nature of imperialism and reform. It would be interesting, then, to know if religious movements or ministries in the American South resembled those of missionaries in colonial regions.[4]

In the same vein, Ring neglects the history of American eugenics as a slight of the postcolonial interpretation. Although she fleetingly mentions prominent eugenic figures and ideas, Ring’s work only touches on the early-twentieth-century movement (that cost over 63,000 Americans their reproductive rights) on three pages. Before settling in on this criticism, I reflected one two questions (mostly to assure myself that I was not harping on something merely of personal interest): Does the omission change the story and would the inclusion of American eugenics change Ring’s argument? While the inclusion might not change the overarching arguments of Ring’s work, or her intervention in the selected historiographical debates, it might have weakened her postcolonial interpretation. American eugenics spread throughout the United States – North, South, white, and black. One common factor linked most of its victims: poverty. For this reason, Ring’s fourth chapter, “The Poor White Problem as the ‘New Race Question’” is particularly unsatisfying given its focus. In this chapter, Ring does note that the Eugenic Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor “stood ready to offer the expert advice of eugenics reformers to South Africans concerned about the possibility of degeneration among poor whites.”[5] This frail connection between the South African poor white problem and the congruent issue in the American South fails to present evidence of eugenic solutions in both regions. Perhaps then, the postcolonial interpretation of the American South as a region sharing the problems and solutions of race suicide and degeneration with colonial geographies breaks down when presented with the eugenic movement.

For a groundbreaking work in the revision of early twentieth-century southern, American, and global history, these criticisms are small cautions. Ring’s work in The Problem South has obviously been well reviewed and accepted as a scholarly addition in the field. Her work also does not claim that the mythical, romantic vision of the American South in the early-twentieth century did not exist on the ground. Taken as a work on specific groups and reform efforts, The Problem South pushes on our interpretation of one of history’s most complicated regions at a very compelling time.