History of Mississippi - 1920s and 1930s

1920s and 1930s

Mississippians saw more prosperity in the 1920s than they had known for two generations, although the state was still poor and rural by national standards. The people nevertheless had a slice of the American Dream. Ownby (1999) in his in-depth study of the state identifies four American dreams that the new consumer culture addressed. The first was the "Dream of Abundance," offering a cornucopia of material goods to all Americans, making them proud to be the richest society on earth. The second was the "Dream of a Democracy of Goods," whereby everyone had access to the same products regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, or class, thereby challenging the aristocratic norms of the rest of the world whereby only the rich or well-connected are granted access to luxury. The "Dream of Freedom of Choice," with its ever expanding variety of good allowed people to fashion their own particular life style. Finally, the "Dream of Novelty," in which ever-changing fashions, new models, and unexpected new products broadened the consumer experience in terms of purchasing skills and awareness of the market, and challenged the conservatism of traditional society and culture, and even politics. Ownby acknowledges that the dreams of the new consumer culture radiated out from the major cities, but notes that they quickly penetrated the most rural and most isolated areas, such as rural Mississippi. With the arrival of the model T after 1910, consumers in rural America were no longer locked into local general stores with their limited merchandise and high prices, and to comparison shop and in towns and cities. Ownby demonstrates that poor black Mississippians shared in the new consumer culture, not only inside Mississippi, but also in motivating the more ambitious to move to Memphis or Chicago.

Not all Mississippi was doing well. In the Pearl River country in the south central region, the 1920s was a decade of persistent poverty and new interest in antimodernist politics and culture. The timber companies that had employed up to half of all workers were running short of timber so payrolls dwindled. Farming was hard-scrabble. Governor Theodore G. Bilbo, a native of the region, won widespread support among the poor white farmers and loggers with his attacks on the elites, the big cities, and the blacks. Dry laws were but one aspect of a pervasive prohibitionism that included laws against business or recreation on Sunday as well as attacks on Catholics and immigrants. Baptist and some other denominations embraced fundamentalism and rejected newfangled liberal ideas such as evolution along with the Social Gospel.