Book review: 'The Athens of the New South'

“Athens of the New South” by Mary Ellen Pethel. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2017. 277 pages, $60 (hardcover), $39.95 (paperback).

How did Nashville become the “it” city to which millennials are flocking? One recent transplant cites “the creative energy and social opportunities of a big city” that it offers “alongside the neighborliness of a small city.” Not only its famous music scene, but also restaurants and coffee shops, independent businesses and vibrant public culture all make Nashville a dynamic magnet.

Mary Ellen Pethel’s fine new study of Nashville, “Athens of the New South,” explores the historical roots of Nashville’s character, examining the role colleges and universities played in the city’s development in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She argues that higher education institutions’ establishment and growth were critical to Nashville’s image as both progressive and New South. By the turn of the century, it was known as a regional center of higher education for both white and black southerners due to such institutions as Vanderbilt University, Peabody College, Fisk University, Meharry Medical College, Ward-Belmont School and Lipscomb College. Universities and colleges marked, for southern progressives, a commitment to industrialization and other economic progress, and to modern urban planning. From 1865 to 1930, Nashville exemplified the ways colleges and universities were essential to shaping the urban South.

Pethel begins just after the Civil War, tracing Nashville’s urbanization and boosters’ emphasis on higher education, with educational institutions crucial to “shaping neighborhoods, public transportation, leisure, nonprofit activism and organizations, and the cultural arts,” in ways that make Nashville distinctive among southern cities. Two more chapters of “The Athens of the South” explore how gender and race shaped educational opportunities and experiences. The final two examine college youth culture and the growing role of athletics, and a conclusion examines contemporary Nashville.

Higher education became a means through which people worked out competing visions of what should constitute a New South city. White urban boosters used the term “New South” to indicate a shift from an agriculture-based economic system reliant on the labor of enslaved people to an industrial one based on waged labor. For some, economic modernization went hand in hand with white supremacist efforts to stymie African-Americans’ progress and equality. However, multiple visions of what a modern South should be competed. Some groups used education to challenge their subordination, though they did not entirely overturn the “white patriarchal structure” (p. 62) that characterized the New South. All in all, a new generation of educated southerners reshaped Nashville in crucial ways.

Pethel examines how women’s higher education developed in both single-sex institutions and co-ed ones, during a period of growing agitation for women’s rights and social reform. Ward Seminary and Belmont College (becoming Ward-Belmont in 1913) served white women from prominent families. Reflecting many Tennesseans’ ambivalence toward women’s education, they offered finishing school aspects and a rigorous academic curriculum, preparing women both for a life of domesticity and for a modern career path, and creating not so much New Women as “modern belles,” Pethel argues. Peabody trained teachers and nurses for these growing female-dominated occupations. Vanderbilt began admitting women into its schools of religion, dentistry, law and medicine, despite handwringing over the dangers of “feminizing” the university. Black institutions likewise began admitting more women.

Overall, Pethel concludes, women used higher education to move into new arenas and to expand the range of acceptable female behaviors, to access a gateway to excellent traditional universities, new intellectual and social freedoms and greater political awareness and engagement. Many women used their education to engage in social reform and “municipal housekeeping,” and made tentative claims for equal rights, reshaping Nashville’s political and social landscape.

For African-Americans, Nashville became a center of higher education through Fisk, Roger Williams, Walden College (then including Meharry Medical School), and Tennessee A&I (now Tennessee State University). Supported by a black elite and white philanthropy, these HBCUs nurtured a growing professional class that set Nashville apart from many southern cities. Fisk was the most prestigious black institution south of Washington, D.C.; Meharry was one of the nation’s only schools to offer advanced medical, dentistry, nursing and pharmacological training to African-Americans; Roger Williams trained teachers, preachers and missionaries; and Tennessee A&I opened in 1912 as the state’s first public higher education institution for black people. Black people struggled against white efforts to control their educational opportunities. Nonetheless, places such as Fisk and Meharry made Nashville a national “magnet for black liberal arts and professional education” for a growing black middle class and elite, as doctors, dentists, nurses, businesspeople, social workers, nurses and perhaps most of all, teachers.

College youth culture and athletics also brought major cultural changes on campuses in those decades. Drinking, dancing, co-ed socializing and a shift away from adult supervision all reshaped college life and changed students’ relationship to Nashville, transforming the city in the process. A growing commercial leisure industry offered roller skating at the Hippodrome, shopping at the Arcade and myriad other pursuits where college students could socialize in mixed-sex groups, away from authority figures. Fraternities reshaped college life and redefined masculine norms. And collegiate athletics came to best represent “Nashville’s symbiotic relationship with its colleges and universities,” Pethel argues (196). No reader will be surprised to find that Vanderbilt played a leading role in forming college athletics’ rules, regulations and conference play. As with commercialized leisure, athletics triggered worries among moral reformers, but to no avail.

Well-grounded in the relevant historical scholarship, richly detailed, yet eminently readable, “Athens of the New South” will appeal to anyone interested in Nashville, higher education, urbanization, race, gender, athletics and college life.

– Reviewed by Dorothea Browder, Western Kentucky University History Department.

– Editor’s note: The author will speak about her book and sign copies in WKU Libraries’ “Kentucky Live” series at 7 p.m. Thursday at Barnes & Noble Booksellers on Campbell Lane.