Life in America

I just finished uploading scans of pictures from this book onto Flickr.
It was published in 1951. I'm sure you can imagine that any book about the south that has blacks picking cotton on the cover is going to be a bit racist and over simplistic. Well Sport, you'd be right. 1951 was a time of wild optimism about the everything in this country and at that time we had no idea what price we'd have to pay for industrialisation and all that wide eyed consumption. This book was part of the propaganda effort to make everyone comfortable with non stop mindless consumerism, pillaging of the earth, and the socio political and economic status quo.

I only scanned the pictures so you'll have to believe me when I tell you that you are missing nothing by not reading the text. This was a kid's book, for older kids like say around grade 3, 4, 5. I could tell as I read it that the author had probably never set foot anywhere south of the Mason Dixon line and he simply relied on encyclopedias, chamber of commerce brochures, and third or fourth hand stories from people who visited the south once, if at all. Banta did his best to make the south of the 1950's not so backward sounding. He'd toss in a fact about and a photo about farming or life in a small town and then as if to say not "It's not like that everywhere down there," he adds a photo and a blurb about all the factories in the 1950's south.
Of course there was not a word about segregation in that book, nor the Jim Crow laws, or anything bad about the south at all. There were plenty of photos that reinforced stereotypes though. Ones like this one of the jolly happy docile working black folks having a good time with their overseer farmer bosses.
And of course there was the obligatory shot of the barefoot kids in the one room schoolhouse.

And folks picking cotton.
And one of us mountain folk at a "sing."
Another highlight of this old book are the picture maps of all the southern states. As you can see they show just what was made in each state and where. I love, as my friend Snad pointed out the first time I used this picture, how they use a hillbilly to represent our end of the state, just a hillbilly and that's it. Of course during that time there was a shit load of tobacco and corn being grown here, as well as tomatoes, and also during that time there were book manufacturers, paper manufacturers, and a nascent chemical company that would one day become a giant in it's field was just getting started.Despite the condescending and somewhat racist tone of the book, I really dig the old photos.
Wherever possible I kept the captions on the pictures, they're like a glimpse into the mind of the author. Incidentally, I bought this book at a local used book store for fifty cents. It had come from the library of a local church. As soon as I saw that it had come from a church library I flipped to the back to see how many people had checked it out and I saw that no one had ever checked it out because the little due date slip in the back had never been stamped. So either the folks who went to that church didn't care much about what went on outside the state much or they didn't need a book like this to remind them of what they already knew. See all the pictures by clicking here.