This Division between Faith in Democracy and Power Descending from Authority
This Division between Faith in Democracy and Power Descending from Authority
From Raleigh to Lookout Mountain, Tennessee
This chapter traces the first leg of Jonathan Daniels's trip through the textile mill towns of North and South Carolina and into Tennessee. His ambivalent attitude toward working-class white southerners related to the popularity of poor-white caricatures in Erskine Caldwell's novels Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre. Daniels saw the impact of the Civilian Conservation Corps in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and pondered the effects of the Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville, Norris, and Chattanooga. TVA commissioner David Lilienthal reassured him that New Deal programs were committed to grassroots democracy rather than social planning by outsiders. Yet Daniels was conscious of the challenges to segregation and white supremacy the New Deal was likely to bring. Wary of federal intervention in the South, Daniels looked to the road ahead with even greater concerns about far left and far right, Communist and proto-fascist, alternatives.
Keywords: Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre, Civilian Conservation Corps, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee Valley Authority, David Lilienthal, Norris, Tennessee
North Carolina Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
