PERSPECTIVE ON THE BIRTH YEARS 1920–1941
George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” made a hit in 1923, and Mickey Mouse showed up in the Disney movie The Circus in 1928. “The Star Spangled Banner” became the national anthem in 1931.
In this period, the Ku Klux Klan rode tall in the saddle across most of the South. Its power to threaten and its violent ways hardly affected most of coastal South Carolina. There are plenty of paradoxes in the way it was. For one thing, blacks outnumbered whites about two to one. And yet, blacks more often worked for whites than the other way around. Black women who worked in whites’ kitchens always entered through the back door. The Jim Crow laws were well known, but more importantly, blacks and whites “knew their place,” meaning they understood the customs that prevailed and rarely, if ever, breached them. Generally, racial relations were as peculiar as slavery but were peaceful.
During the almost two dozen years represented in this era, little changed in the economy of southern Beaufort County. Neither the upward spiral of the stock market in the 1920s nor the crash at the end of the decade had much effect on most of the residents. Local incomes continued to be dependent on the natural resources—forests, seafood and soil. Cash and jobs continued to be scarce. Most work was still physical, as was most recreation.
In 1925, the Houlihan Bridge across the Savannah River opened, but for most residents of this corner of South Carolina, the least expensive, most convenient way to get to Savannah, Georgia, was still by steamer until the late 1930s. Gradually, pavement replaced some of the old oyster-shell roads, largely through Works Progress Administration projects, and cars and trucks replaced mules, oxen and horses for transportation. Electricity came at last, almost as a miracle to replace the dim kerosene lanterns, but telephone service did not arrive until the 1940s.
The Lowcountry continued to be a place of beauty and friendliness, a place where everybody knew your name. The Lowcountry’s children of the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s, black and white, grew up in splendid isolation.
Ten will tell the way it was.