White Columns, Southern Fantasies

Ed Ayers: As we just heard, nostalgic sentiment for a time gone by has been something of a crux for popular culture, but what does nostalgia look like when it isn’t broadcast on your television and instead is found right outside your front door? What happens when a nod to the past can’t be found scrolling through TV Land, but roaming through your neighborhood? I’m talking about architecture, and how some buildings have allusions to another era. For example, if you drive around the South, you’ll probably come across houses or maybe government buildings with white columns out front, but why? Why have white columns become such a commonality on buildings today?

Philip H.: They’ve really become a kind of exaggerated aspect of Southern architecture things to things like movies and fiction.

Ed Ayers: Philip Harrington is researching the ways in which modern, white-columned houses evoke the architecture of the Antebellum South. It’s a style he calls “plantation revival”.

Philip H.: Plantation revival is a term that I’ve come up with with my research partner, Lydia Mattice Brandt, to describe these buildings and landscapes that are constructed and designed to evoke 19th century historic plantation buildings and landscape. So they’re really about Antebellum Southern fantasies.

Ed Ayers: Phillip says white columns are often remembered as the epitome of Antebellum Southern architecture. But contrary to popular belief, he says the South wasn’t filled with plantation houses with big columns on the front.

Philip H.: That’s something that comes as a surprise to many people, I think throughout the world, people who’ve been exposed to Gone with the Wind and seeing the white columns. Margaret Mitchell, actually, in the novel Gone with the Wind described Tara as ugly, and sprawling, and columnists. She was aware that not all plantation houses had white columns. The Hollywood producers had different ideas in mind, and so they really helped spread this idea that white columns were an essential part of Southern architecture before the Civil War. And Gone with the Wind really amplifies the fantasy, but it’s certainly not the starting point. If anything, it’s responding to a fantasy that’s already alive and well.

Philip H.: In our research, we really discovered that a lot of this starts up in the late 19th century with novels, with plays. If you think about how a play might be staged, if it takes place on a plantation, you just put some columns up on the stage, it becomes a facade. And then when we get into movies in the 19-teens, 20s and 30s, that’s really where we start to see a lot of these movies that take place in the South being populated with white columns. And so Gone with the Wind, which comes to big screens in 1939, is really the latest in a long line of these white-columned dramatic productions.

Ed Ayers: So if you went to parts of the United States outside the South, would you see this reference to the past with white columns on different houses?

Philip H.: You very well might because it is a national architectural trend as far as these buildings that in some way speak to this traditional Southern architecture with the columns. There are columns on a lot of buildings. And so it can be difficult to determine what is something that is supposed to look like a plantation. Something that I find very curious is I recently found a postcard of the Alaska governor’s mansion. And on the caption on the back of it, and this is probably from the 1950s, it refers to it as a plantation style mansion.

Ed Ayers: Wow.

Philip H.: And this is in Alaska. So yeah, it’s all over the place. But you think about who’s looking at it and deciding that it looks like a plantation, and that’s the one thing that I find very curious. So plantation revival, it’s one of those things where you know when you see it, but it can be difficult to pin down in terms of an architectural style.

Ed Ayers: So, we do certainly see a lot of them on college campuses. And you and I both have been to a lot of Southern colleges and universities, and you certainly see on the fraternity houses and sorority houses, this is a big theme. Well, what do you make of that, Philip?

Philip H.: Well, my research partner, Lydia Brandt, did some work on fraternity houses at the University of Alabama. And what she found was pretty surprising to me. In the 1920s is when you first start to see these fraternities building freestanding structures, and they built them in a variety of architectural styles. It’s only in the 1960s when we get a new round of houses, they’re getting bigger to accommodate a larger student population, that’s when we start to see these white-columned fraternity houses, what we often associate, especially in the South, with fraternity and sorority houses.

Philip H.: I don’t think it’s any accident that the university is dealing with desegregation at this time, is trying to figure out how to, I’m sure, maintain certain types of segregation, and they then choose for these houses these white columns. If you just look at the houses, they’re not direct copies of plantation houses, but it’s certainly I think no accident that all of them end up taking on this white-columned form.

Philip H.: One thing that’s I think especially interesting to me in terms of what makes them plantation revival is not so much just their architectural features, but the types of performance that happened around these houses. So things like old South days, you have these houses that end up draped and Confederate flags so that the white columns are just coming through that fabric. So they really act as kind of a stage, like a white-columned stage for antebellum fantasy performance. So when we think of plantation revival, we have to think of something beyond the buildings themselves, but how are they being used?

Ed Ayers: So, there are other building styles and avocations of the past in the South in the form of Confederate monuments that have been much in the news for several years now. How do you relate your research to the monuments to the Confederacy that we see around?

Philip H.: I think that there is an important distinction to make between Confederate monuments and at least most plantation revival buildings. Confederate monuments, just like I think most monuments, are built to tell a very explicit message that is difficult to misinterpret.

Ed Ayers: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Philip H.: They are erected by people who are concerned that someone will forget something, and they want to make sure they don’t forget it. Plantation revival buildings so often were built as private homes. Of course with something like a fraternity or sorority house, it’s playing a different role, it’s playing a more public role, but frequently they’re private buildings. So I think that the people who are building them may not even themselves really be fully aware of why they’re choosing a house that looks like that. Think about all the people who build houses or buy houses, we usually don’t think about very explicitly, “What is it about ourselves that these buildings represent?” But clearly, they do represent a lot about our desire and what we want people to recognize are about ourselves.

Philip H.: So plantation revival buildings aren’t built typically with that sort of memorial aspect. And there are also a whole lot more of them. So whereas we talk about Confederate monuments in terms of, should we remove them or not, that’s not really an option for plantation revival spaces. And I think, also, because it’s so difficult sometimes to distinguish what was plantation revival and what were the intentions of someone who built that building, removal is not obviously a good solution.

Ed Ayers: I mean, are they a problem? I mean, are they sending a message that is not helpful?

Philip H.: I think they can be a problem. I think the way to think of them, the buildings themselves aren’t so much the problem, but they can be used as tools. Thinking about the use of these plantation revival fraternity houses as backdrops for things like old South days. And, of course, a lot of that has really faded out, thankfully over time, but this type of antebellum performance, I think that they can be used as tools in ways that are definitely problematic. I think when you create a neighborhood and attach the name plantation to it and it’s not a historic plantation, and then use architecture that very clearly ties that property to the plantation in the minds of the public, you have to think about what kind of message you are sending to people who might want to be in that space.

Ed Ayers: It’s quite common in subdivisions, I’ve noticed. And there also seem to be a proliferation of places that tap the name “plantation” onto the name of the subdivision. What’s going on there?

Philip H.: Well, I have a nice close example. My brother used to live in a neighborhood in Georgia called Ivy Falls Plantation. And Ivy Falls Plantation always was very curious to me. It was sort of like the Holy Roman Empire, it’s not holy, Roman, or an empire, because there was no Ivy, no falls, no plantation, so completely made up. And I think plantation was just that added… it’s such a kind of throwaway type of attachment to stick on something, especially in the South. But I think it just gives that little touch of class. I think, again, it’s often a throwaway gesture.

Philip H.: There was a neighborhood near where I grew up called Arlington, and I noticed that they were promoting it using a picture of Robert Lee’s Arlington mansion that overlooks DC. And I think that they just Googled it, and they thought, “Well, what sounds ostentatious?” “I know. Arlington.” “Let’s stake this house on there.” And I thought, “That did not stand in Columbia County, Georgia,” I’m sorry, but most people, of course, aren’t going to really be thinking that way.

Ed Ayers: So how do we determine when we see a plantation revival house, the intentions of the people who put that place up or who lives there? How can we know what it means?

Philip H.: Oh. Well, that’s a great question. And you know that as a historian, that’s a really difficult one to answer. It can be really hard to assign motivation to historical actors why people are doing what they’re doing. And so often, they don’t really know because they don’t really stop and think about it. Hopefully, one takeaway from this project is that, I think that within certain contexts, people could be a little bit more careful. We have enough historic plantations. We don’t need new plantations. So if you are developing a neighborhood, there’s no reason to attach plantation to the name of it if there was no actual plantation there.

Philip H.: So if it’s not a real plantation, hey, just maybe don’t stick that name on it, and maybe be a little bit more thoughtful about that. I think also, if it’s a building that is, for instance, a clubhouse or a fraternity house, something that maybe comes from more of a history of exclusivity, maybe a building that’s designed to evoke a plantation house isn’t the way to go.

Ed Ayers: Philip Herrington is an assistant professor of history at James Madison University.

Ed Ayers: In the history of biz, calling somebody nostalgic is like one of the worst professional insults that we can get. Why is it that nostalgia seems the enemy of history to historians?

Joanne Freeman: Well, I mean, partly I suppose because nostalgia feels personal and emotional. And as historians, I suppose on a certain level… I don’t necessarily agree with this, but on a certain level, we’re not supposed to be just reflecting personal thoughts and particularly not emoting in that way.

Nathan C.: Yeah. I think nostalgia conveys a certain thinness. And I know historians pride themselves on their big footnotes and endnotes, and it’s almost as if through the sheer volume of the work that scholars do that we’re supposed to in some ways beat the nostalgia out of us. But I got to say, I mean, there have certainly been scholarly works that I have read that felt nostalgic to me in spite of them having many footnotes. And so, I wonder if there’s a certain relationship that is always there when we think about the past in ways that feel maybe too saccharine or useful in ways to solve immediate social or political problems.

Ed Ayers: Yeah. People often come up to me and say, “I just love the Civil War,” and I think, “You don’t, really.” You love learning about the Civil War, and mastering all those battles and details. And I respect that. But I find that people assume those of us who live in the past must love it, but I don’t want to live for a day in the 19th century. And so, I don’t know if nostalgia comes from people who don’t really know much about the past, and therefore just project onto it what they want, or am I just projecting my own professional disdain for this enemy of our profession.

Joanne Freeman: That’s interesting, though, because I do think people often, I guess particularly because I’m pontificating about the founding, I get asked a similar question a lot, which is, “Would you want to go back there?” And not even that, but, “If you went back, where would you go or what would you do?” First of all, I usually say, “Well, I would die in childbirth. Probably that would be my fate in that time period.”

Joanne Freeman: But I think along the lines of what you just said, I obviously am passionate about the people in the period I study, but it’s not because I love them. You know what I mean? I love studying them, and I’m fascinated by them, and I want to figure them out. And there’s a lot of emotion bound up with that. But it’s not just, “Boy oh boy, do I love this.” And even worse than that, I suppose to a historian, it’s not, “This makes me feel so good,” which is kind of what nostalgia does.

Nathan C.: I mean, that feeling part, Joanna, I think is really so critical, because it’s almost as if when you think about what it’d look like if history was wrapped in the Star Wars universe or the world of J.R.R. Tolkien. There’s a fantasy element to this, where people are trying to escape into the past. And it’s weird, because I think about a film like Field of Dreams from 1989. And baseball has this way of just totally dripping with nostalgia in a way that almost no other sport seems to be able to achieve. And it’s totally about creating this space where someone can literally go back and watch the old ball players.

Nathan C.: I remember that that film and all of it’s magic. But it’s also, I think, a sign about how a lot of people tend to think back. I mean, when I talked to Daniel Marcus about the ‘50s, it was about deep concerns about the ‘70s, and wanting to go back to something different. Or when folks in the ‘90s or 2000s were nostalgic about the Reagan era. I mean, it was about a particular conservative politics that seemed to be on stronger footing than it was in the wake of someone like Bill Clinton… I mean, his presidency.

Nathan C.: And so I guess for me, there’s a way to understand nostalgia, even separate from say “bad scholarly history” or even someone who’s simply a Civil War enthusiasts and say, “Okay, there’s an element of escapism that’s baked into nostalgia,” where somebody pines for, to your point earlier, at living in a moment that feels easier or simpler than the complexities of contemporary moment.

Ed Ayers: We also know that nostalgia is not entirely a benign thing. It can also be weaponized. Nostalgia seems very much alive in our culture today. How do you think it’s being used by people?

Nathan C.: Well, I think the obvious example of this is the way that you had a presidential candidate in recent years talk about American history as being basically his platform; really, the base of his platform. When president Trump argued for Making America Great Again, it was a looking back. It was about having people who were going to pull the lever for him, basically feel as if they were undoing recent history. And there are a number of ways in which people could mark that recent history, whether it was about, the desegregation of the American presidency with Barack Obama, whether it was about issues of gender or sexuality, immigration issues.

Nathan C.: I think it is important to recognize that we didn’t really have a powerful, historical counter-narrative during that campaign. Right? There was a lot of talk about the future. And there’s all kinds of ways in which, as we know, politicians will run on a vision of the future, but I find it to be very telling that we don’t have immediately at hand, a bipartisan commitment to nostalgia in the sense of saying, “Okay, let’s all go back to the 1950s and find different things that we can weaponize.” There’s a different relationship between the past and the future for a lot of our political conversations, I would say.

Joanne Freeman: That’s really interesting, though, because that’s nostalgia as history. Right? That’s the suggestion that we’re going to make it great again, because there was this, again, there was this moment where everything was golden and beautiful. And in and of itself, that’s saying, “Let’s be nostalgic,” and that’s kind of what that statement means. But some people go back to the past and are going to think about that kind of golden past, others are going to go back to the past and see complexity. They’re not going to have that nostalgic glossing.

Joanne Freeman: And I think the question you raised, which is really interesting, which is, one side in that election was kind of grounded on this golden pass and the other side didn’t have a counter-narrative, what would be the counter-narrative for people on the other side given that liberals are grounded on the idea of complexity?

Ed Ayers: I think that if you’d ask the people who support the Make America Great Again idea, they would say, “Look. You liberals are just as fixated in nostalgia as we are. It’s just that your nostalgia is that of the 1960s.”

Nathan C.: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ed Ayers: “You’re all about identity politics.” Right? “And you’re trying to recapture some time when the civil rights movement was new or the women’s movement was new. So you’re recycling the past just as much as we are.” What would you all say to that?

Nathan C.: Oh. I think there is a lot of truth to that. I mean, I think there’s something about having a candidate in Bernie Sanders on the left, who lives through certain periods that are directly pulling from this kind of countercultural moment. I think his popularity in the way that he frankly talks about issues feels in some ways kind of old-timey and fire and brimstone from an older period.

Nathan C.: But I think there is actually an even more fringe example of nostalgia on, I guess you would call it the left… I’m not entirely sure, actually, just isn’t thinking about people’s nostalgia for Jim Crow. And this is something that isn’t really part of the mainstream debate just yet. I mean, you hear some of this around, the concerns around reparations, or building black banks institutions. But there are folks who believe that one of the answers to the problems of lingering inequality is basically just empowering communities to “do for themselves”.

Nathan C.: And some people do actually look back at the 1930s, 40s and 50s in a progressive way, and say, “You know what? The push for desegregation came with so many costs to black business, black education,” so on and so, that we now have to have a movement that reinvests in different kinds of enclave economies or Buy Black movements and so forth.

Nathan C.: Again, these aren’t necessarily common conversations. And I wonder if there’s a similar conversation around the question of the women’s vote. Right? I mean, looking back at the 1920s as a moment where women were clearly fighting for the very fact of suffrage, is that now one of the ways in which we’re trying to encourage younger women to really take the franchise seriously? Or maybe that argument doesn’t have to be made, but I have to imagine that there are a variety of different political movements that we can point to where the stakes of what was at issue were so high that you can actually draw a progressive inspiration from earlier decades as well.

Joanne Freeman: That’s interesting though, because it sounds like what you’re talking about there, Nathan, is going to the past and plugging into the past, not for comforting nostalgic feelings but to have a sense of the stake. So quite the opposite. Right?

Nathan C.: Right.

Joanne Freeman: Going back to the past to remember the emotion, and the anxiety, and the fight, a different emotion, but still to make feel something, that’s going to make you do something in the present.

Ed Ayers: So this brings us back to the first question, the difference between nostalgia and history. We do believe that politics has to be infused with an understanding of how we got here, but what is dangerous is a false notion of how we got here. And how will we know what’s false and not? All those footnotes and endnotes you’re talking about Nathan.

Nathan C.: I do think that there are ways to be very honest about the fact that we’re all historical subjects. I mean, one of my all-time favorite lines from a scholar is Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s line from Silencing the Past, where he says, “We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be.” And so, I think there is a real advantage about being honest about that. But to your point, it feels as if maybe the real value added that historians have, and I think citizens in general can bring to these political debates, is simply to say, “Okay. We know we’re going to be thinking about our history. Well, let’s think about history in a smart way, in a way that is informed, that is documented, that is about context with a long view, instead of simply trying to score talking points or just simply win the next election cycle.”

Nathan C.: I mean, one of the things that I loved about your interview on white columns and plantation revival, Ed, was that it wasn’t just about getting rid of columns necessarily, but actually talking about what’s going on inside these plantation revival structures. Right? In fraternity houses, are there really arcane Confederate rituals going on in these places? Because that means something very different than simply there being white columns on the outside. And I wonder if our general political nostalgia should be approached similarly. Like what’s the real content of the conversations happening within our historical discussions?

Ed Ayers: On the subject of nostalgia, we have an announcement to make, and we have our good friend Brian Balogh joining us. Our announcement is that our last show will be published on July 3rd.

Brian Balogh: From the beginning, BackStory has been a show that brings together multiple voices discussing multiple related topics, inviting guests from many backgrounds from all over the country and beyond.

Joanne Freeman: Frankly, we made the show as hard to do as possible. The amount of labor behind the scenes is enormous. The amount of skill and time in producing the show is awe-inspiring.

Nathan C.: The commitment of the hosts, who have other jobs, has been challenging. The resources required to sustain such a complex show have been daunting.

Ed Ayers: Everyone has made it work for 12 years. But if there’s one thing we know as historians is that all things, especially good things, perhaps, come to an end. It’s been a great adventure bringing you BackStory, and we look forward to reflecting on that adventure through the spring. You can find more this announcement on our website backstoryradio.org.

Ed Ayers: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode, or ask us your questions about history. Send us an email at backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Joanne Freeman: Special thanks this week to the Johns Hopkins studios in Baltimore.

Nathan C.: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Nathan C.: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham, for Virginia Humanities.