Contemporary Authors

• No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2016

1. No Depression in Heaven : the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the transformation of religion in the Delta LCCN 2015018302 Type of material Book Personal name Greene, Alison Collis. Main title No Depression in Heaven : the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the transformation of religion in the Delta / Alison Collis Greene. Published/Produced Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, [2016] Description xvi, 317 pages : illustrations, map ; 25 cm ISBN 9780199371877 (hardcover : alkaline paper) Shelf Location FLM2016 048702 CALL NUMBER BL2527.A63 G73 2016 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2)

• Mississippi State University - Department of History - http://www.history.msstate.edu/people/alison-collis-greene/

  Alison Collis Greene

  Alison Collis Greene
  Alison Collis Greene
  Assistant Professor and Off Campus Recruiting Coordinator
  American Religious History, 20th Century United States
  662-325-3604
  agreene@history.msstate.edu
  Education
  Ph.D., History, Yale University, 2010
  B.A., University of North Carolina, Religious Studies and Anthropology, 2001
  Academic Career
  Assistant Professor of History, Mississippi State University, 2010 to Present.
  Research Interests
  I am a historian of American religions and the twentieth century United States. My first book, No Depression in Heaven: The Great, Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta (Oxford University Press, 2016), argues that the Great Depression and New Deal remade American religion just as it remade the nation’s politics and social order. Set in Memphis and the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta, No Depression in Heaven weaves together the stories of ordinary believers, religious leaders, and grassroots activists to describe the collapse in voluntary and religious aid, the widespread demand for federal intervention, and a gradual disenchantment with the state among conservative Protestants in the 1930s.

  My current research, for a manuscript tentatively entitled God’s Green Earth: Religion, Race, and the Land Since the Gilded Age, focuses on the racial and religious underpinnings of debates about the relationship between people and the land in the modern United States. Its characters are the farmers, rural reformers, civil rights activists, grassroots theologians, and civic leaders who fought to shape the nation’s approaches to agriculture, conservation, and the environment.

  Publications
  Book

  No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta. Oxford University Press, 2016.

  Book Publicity

  Interview with Eric C. Miller, “The ‘Southern Cage’: How the Myth of the Redemptive

  Depression Keeps Blacks at the Margins,” Religion Dispatches, July 31, 2016.

  Interview with Karen Brown, Mississippi Edition, Mississippi Public Broadcasting ThinkRadio,

  March 31, 2016.

  Interview with Jana Hooks, featured on front page of Faith section, Jackson Clarion-Ledger,

  January 16, 2016.

  Blog posts at The Page 99 Test and Writers Read, January 2016.

  Interview with Carolina Wazer featured at historybuff.com, January 4, 2016.

  “No Depression in Heaven: The South, Race, Religion, and FDR,” a book excerpt featured at

  Salon.com, December 25, 2015.

  Interview with John Fea at “Author’s Corner,” The Way of Improvement blog, December 20, 2015.

  Selected Articles and Book Chapters

  “Radical Christianity and Cooperative Economics in the Post World War II South.” In Between the Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class, edited by Christopher Cantwell, Heath Carter and Janine Giordano Drake. University of Illinois Press, 2016.

  “The Welfare of Faith.” In Faith in the New Millennium: The Future of Religion and American Politics, edited by Darren Dochuk and Matthew Avery Sutton. Oxford University Press, 2016.

  “‘A Divine Revelation?’: Southern Churches Respond to the New Deal.” In Faithful Republic: Religion and American Politics, edited by Andrew Preston, Bruce Schulman, and Julian Zelizer. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

  “The Redemption of Souls and Soils: Religion and the Rural Crisis in the Mississippi Delta.” In Gods of the Mississippi, edited by Michael Pasquier. Indiana University Press, 2013.

  “The End of ‘The Protestant Era’?” Church History 80:3 (September 2011).

  “The Faith of the ‘Flotsam and Jetsam’,” The Journal of Southern Religion 13 (Fall 2011).

  Other Publications

  “The Great Depression and Religion in Mississippi,” Mississippi History Now, forthcoming Winter 2016-2017.

  “The Real Depression: The Greatest Generation Needed Welfare,” Christian Century 133:5 (March 2, 2016): 26-31. (also a featured article, online edition: February 26, 2016).

  “Mississippi: A Historian Challenges H.L. Mencken,” part of The States Project, Religion and Politics, October 19, 2012.

  “Let’s Remember History, When Religious Institutions Welcomed Government Support,” The Table, Religion and Politics, June 4, 2012.

  Recent and Upcoming Presentations

  “Interracial Cowboys, Interfaith Reformers, and the Post-World War II Rehabilitation of Europe.” American Society of Church History. Denver, Colorado, January 6, 2017.

  Roundtable organizer and participant. “Southern Religious History in the Twenty-First Century.” St. Pete’s Beach, Florida. November 4, 2016.

  “Agricultural Crises, Rural Church Leadership, and the Public Good in the Early Twentieth Century United States.” Organization of American Historians. Providence, Rhode Island, April 7, 2016.

  ‘To Build a New Economic Life’: Cooperative Economics and Radical Christianity in the Rural South after World War II.” American Society of Church History. New York, New York, January 3, 2015.

  “‘Keepers of the Holy Earth’: Southern Radical Christianity and the Farmer after the New Deal.” American Academy of Religion. San Diego, California, November 24, 2014.

  “The Friends of the Soil and the Rural Church’s Role in Agriculture.” Agricultural History Society. Banff, Alberta, Canada, June 13, 2013.

  Honors & Awards
  Fellow, Young Scholars in American Religion, Center for Religion and American Culture, 2013-2015.
  Arts and Sciences HARP Research Fellow, Mississippi State University, 2011-2012.
  Carolyn S. Cobb Faculty Award, Mississippi State University, 2011.
  Edwin W. Small Prize for outstanding dissertation in United States history, Yale University, 2011.
  Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, 2009-2010.
  Louisville Institute Honorary Dissertation Fellowship, 2009-2010.
  Lubin-Winant Research Fellowship, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, 2009.
  Richard J. Franke Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, Yale University, 2005-2007.
  Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, 2004-2005.
  Phi Beta Kappa Society, 2001.
  Morehead Scholar, University of North Carolina, 1997-2001.
  Courses Taught
  HI 1073: The United States Since 1877
  HI 3903: Historiography and Historical Methods
  HI 4253: American Religious HistoryHI 4990: African American Religious History
  HI 4990: African American Religious History
  HI 8803: Colloquium in American Religious History
  HI 8953: Colloquium in United States History, 1877-1945

• The Clarion-Ledger - http://www.clarionledger.com/story/life/faith/2016/01/15/no-depression-heaven-author-q-and-a/78811366/

  "No Depression in Heaven": Author Q&A
  Jana Hoops, Clarion-Ledger correspondent 3:30 p.m. CT Jan. 15, 2016
  635883895835947007-9780199371877.jpg
  (Photo: Special to The Clarion-Ledger)
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  An award-winning Mississippi State University professor of American religious history and 20th-century United States, Alison Collis Greene has been faithful to her career calling — which is to say, she knows of what she speaks, and has the research to back it up.

  In her first book, “No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta” (Oxford University Press), Greene makes the case that the Great Depression of the late 1920s and the entire '30s changed the roles and the expectations of religion in America, alongside politics and the social order, all at the same time.

  Of the book’s 317 pages, more than a third is devoted to appendices, notes, bibliography and index materials, backing up her nine years of research and writing as she investigated how these major shifts unfolded in Memphis and the Delta regions of Mississippi and Arkansas.

  A native of Bakersville, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Greene spent some time in Helena, Arkansas, after college. It was there that she met her husband, Jason Morgan Ward, who is also a history professor at Mississippi State. They have two young sons, Amos and Theo, and two dogs, Huck and Ellie.

  How did you develop your strong interests in history and religious studies?

  My dad was once a Southern Baptist minister. Just after he moved from seminary back to Bakersville for his first job as a pastor, our landlord saw my dad’s Greek and Hebrew texts on the bookshelves and grumbled about how no one should mess with the King James Version. Shortly thereafter he kicked us out of the house. He said it was for not mowing the lawn, but it was the Bibles. I thought there must be something awfully powerful in those books. I studied Hebrew Bible in college, but by the time I got to graduate school I was more interested in modern American Christianity.

  What inspired you to write “No Depression in Heaven”?

  I wanted to know what happens to religion in moments of widespread crisis — what kind of theological responses would emerge; and also whether people turned to churches or away from them, and why. On a structural level, I wanted to know whether religious institutions changed how they operated, and how they weathered the crisis.

  ADVERTISING

  In the book, you make the case that, because human need was so great during the Depression, churches and religious sources in the South were not able to help all those who were in desperate need — and they turned to the government for aid. Ultimately, how did this, as you say, change forever the relationship between Southern Christians and their federal government?

  Religious agencies weren’t able to help everyone even when times were good — and they didn’t want to. Most blamed the poor for their own problems. But that was awfully hard to do during the Great Depression, when so many people suffered. Churches and charities went broke just as people needed help most, so religious leaders began to demand that the federal government take some responsibility.

  They saw the New Deal as a religious victory. People could now turn someplace besides the church when things were tough. Eventually, some religious leaders decided they didn’t like that very much after all. Even if they did, it meant a new kind of relationship — sometimes cooperative, sometimes competitive — between religious and state aid.

  Your book focuses on the Depression’s direct and local effects on Memphis and the Delta regions of Mississippi and Arkansas. How did the flood of 1927 and the drought afterward contribute to the economic woes already creeping into the area?

  Well, as Arkansan Brooks Hays said, “The Great Depression would not have been so bad if it hadn’t come in the middle of hard times.” There was a widespread agricultural crisis after World War I, and then the 1927 flood wiped out people’s livelihoods. They had just begun to recover when the stock market crashed, the banks failed, and then the 1930-'31 drought destroyed both cotton and food crops. Sharecroppers and tenant farmers had it the hardest, and it just kept getting worse.

  How did the government’s new role seem to change the ministers’ “moral authority” during these sweeping social changes?

  Middle-class white Protestants had a lot of power in Memphis and the Delta. They weren’t keen on Prohibition repeal, and then some religious leaders began to see New Deal works programs and Social Security as competition. The New Deal did not provide direct charity except in the short-term Federal Emergency Relief Administration, but its works and social programs did provide a safety net.

  Some religious leaders were put out that they were not allowed to administer New Deal aid or to decide who got hired for public works. That meant that people who needed help didn’t have to come to the churches anymore, and the churches didn’t get to decide who should get help and who should not.

  How did the hard times affect the racial problems that were already a reality in this culture?

  In some cases, it motivated poor blacks and poor whites to join together to challenge the planter-dominated power structure. The interracial Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the Delta and Providence Cooperative Farms pushed for economic and racial justice, and both of those efforts grew out of working-class Christianity.

  On the other hand, politically powerful Southerners were important to the New Deal’s success. They were also committed to Jim Crow capitalism. Roosevelt allowed most New Deal programs to be administered locally, which allowed for white control and segregation. Yet the mere inclusion of African-Americans in the New Deal was enough to turn some white Southerners against it.

  In what ways would you say these changes have carried their marks over into society even today? In what ways are we, as you say in the book, “a nation haunted by a past it refuses to remember”?

  Americans who want to dismantle the welfare state are determined to ignore how bad the Depression was, and how astonishingly popular the New Deal was. You couldn’t find many people at that moment saying that the churches were doing a great job helping people and should just keep at it.

  How long did it take you to research and write this book, and what would you like for readers to take away from it?

  From proposal to publication, the book took nine years. As far as what I hope readers will take away: I hope it gives people a sense of how uncertain the world felt in the first years of the Depression. There was so much unnecessary suffering and sorrow, and no one knew what to do about it.

  Solutions did not come quickly. Churches and religious societies that did most of the region’s charity work before the Depression applauded the New Deal by the time it came. They were broke and overwhelmed, and they were very grateful that the federal government would help regulate capitalism and the workplace and create a sense of security for people. Roosevelt got 96 percent of the vote in Mississippi in 1932, and 97 percent in 1936, after most of the New Deal had taken effect. In fact, even in Memphis and the Delta, more people expressed concern that the New Deal didn’t do enough for people than that it did too much.

  The tremendous animosity that many people express toward federal programs today was unthinkable then, when the same private solutions you see proposed now had just proven absolutely disastrous. A robust social safety net helps to equalize opportunity and prevent unnecessary suffering.

  Please tell me about the cover of the book — how you came up with the title, and what the photo is about.

  “No Depression in Heaven” was a song the Carter family recorded in 1936. It’s by Nazarene songwriter James D. Vaughan, and is about the Depression as the beginning of the end times — a common theological response to the crisis.

  The photo is of an open-air meeting of the Pilgrim Holiness Church in Blytheville, Arkansas. When the founding minister left for another church, his wife took over as pastor. One of my chapters is about the varieties of Christianity in the 1930s, with informal churches meeting in homes and out in the open.

  Do you have plans for a future publication?

  My current research, for a manuscript tentatively titled “God’s Green Earth: Religion, Race, and the Land Since the Gilded Age,” focuses on the racial and religious underpinnings of debates about the relationship between people and the land in the modern United States. Its characters are the farmers, rural reformers, civil rights activists, grassroots theologians, and civic leaders who fought to shape the nation’s approaches to agriculture, conservation and the environment.

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Print Marked Items
No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression,
the New Deal, and the Transformation of
Religion in the Delta
Jeannie Whayne
Journal of Southern History.
83.1 (Feb. 2017): p213.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta. By
Alison Collis Greene. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xviii, 317. $34.95, ISBN 978­0­
19­937187­7.)
No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta
analyzes the impact of the Great Depression and the changes it wrought on religion in the Arkansas and Mississippi
Deltas and in Memphis, Tennessee, the most important metropolitan cotton center in the region. Alison Collis Greene
paints a moving portrait of the struggles of both poor black and white cotton workers in the countryside and in the city,
paying close attention to how their religion shaped their understanding of what was happening to them. She argues that
religious leaders of the conventional Christian denominations were reluctant to abandon long­held precepts about the
causes of material distress and initially viewed the Great Depression as a sign of spiritual decline. Preaching
redemption from economic disaster by turning to God instead of to other alternatives­­such as the federal government­­
southern religious leaders found their congregations increasingly restive. Ultimately, when church leaders realized the
enormity of the economic crisis confronting the country, their own utter inability to deal with the suffering of the poor,
and the danger to the cotton economy, they abruptly changed course. Religious and political leaders embraced New
Deal programs and used them to consolidate their power, both material and spiritual. By the end of the 1930s, however,
after the danger to the cotton economy passed, these leaders returned to their original positions and became critical
again of government intervention generally and of New Deal programs specifically.
Greene perceptively analyzes dissenters, some of whom even dared to engage in a systematic critique of American
capitalism. Among these dissenting Christians were Catholic leaders from Pope Pius XI on down, homegrown
southern Christian radicals, and a few adherents of the Social Gospel movement. Among the last were a few students
of Alva Taylor, a Vanderbilt University professor who was also a Disciples of Christ minister. Imbued with Christian
socialist ideology and a commitment to civil rights, Taylor's students played crucial roles in fighting southern rural
poverty by supporting the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU). Founded in eastern Arkansas in 1934, the STFU
united black and white tenants and sharecroppers in an alliance against New Deal agricultural programs. The names of
Ward Rodgers, Claude Williams, and Howard Kester are intimately connected to the evolution of that organization.
One of the most fascinating sections of Greene's book covers the itinerant evangelical preachers who worked outside
the conventional religious denominations. Here Greene makes an important point often overlooked by historians and
certainly overlooked by many observers at the time: the religion of the poor was more a lived experience than one they
expressed in a church building. Too poor to construct a church and too transient to support one had they done so, poor
Christians attended church irregularly, and when they did, it was often in a home, in a public building, or outside.
These worshippers responded to charismatic traveling preachers enthusiastically, and Greene's analysis of one such
person demonstrates the rifts within a traditional denomination, the Baptists. Fighting Joe Jeffers had keen insight into
the religious environment of the Delta and a sense of what appealed to people suffering an economic calamity beyond
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their comprehension. A vaudeville­trained performer with a sense of the dramatic, Jeffers was not above using the
situation to his advantage. He landed in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in the early 1930s and soon stood at the center of a
dispute within a congregation that hinged on his interpretation of what caused their economic difficulties. Although he
arrived as a revival speaker, he saw an opportunity to land the pulpit at First Baptist Church in Jonesboro. The result
was chaos, and Jeffers eventually departed after a gunfight left one man dead.
No Depression in Heaven is an important book that should be of interest to those studying religion, economics, the
1930s, labor activism, and civil rights. The book is deeply researched, includes substantive crucial analysis, and is
beautifully written.
Jeannie Whayne
University of Arkansas
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Whayne, Jeannie. "No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of
Religion in the Delta." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 1, 2017, p. 213+. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481354186&it=r&asid=261a87f91fc198baf102332c475ae715.
Accessed 13 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481354186
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Greene, Alison Collis: No depression in heaven:
the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the
transformation of religion in the Delta
A.W. Klink
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.10 (June 2016): p1488.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
Greene, Alison Collis. No depression in heaven: the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the transformation of
religion in the Delta. Oxford, 2015. 317p bibl index afp ISBN 9780199371877 cloth, $34.95; ISBN 9780199371907
ebook, contact publisher for price
53­4336
BL2527
2015­18302 CIP
Combining careful statistical analysis and powerful gut­wrenching stories from archives, Greene (history, Mississippi
State Univ.) provides an honest portrayal of the poverty and deprivation in the Mississippi Delta during the Great
Depression. She notes that there is a "myth" of a "redemptive depression" that churches, families, and communities
pulled together to support one another, when the reality showed that communities and social agencies lacked the
resources to meet community needs, eventually looking to federal New Deal programs to relieve poverty. Because the
northern federal government would not abide by the racially prejudiced rules of the Jim Crow South, southern states
found ways to appoint themselves to distribute money in ways that denied economic opportunities to African
Americans. Greene notes that as the churches ceded their role as social services providers to the state, they became less
influential. Instead of remembering the collaboration between church and state, southern Evangelicals sought to
undermine the state with the myth that the US had in times past worked without federal aid to provide the needs of
private citizens, when in fact the opposite was true. This book combines powerful stories and brilliant historical
analysis to reveal an important chapter in the reconfiguration of church­state relationships. A vital and important book.
Summing Up: **** Essential. Upperdivision undergraduates through faculty.­­A. W. Klink, Duke University
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Klink, A.W. "Greene, Alison Collis: No depression in heaven: the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the
transformation of religion in the Delta." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1488.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942747&it=r&asid=675adb3af784181ea3132d0ee3975e93.
Accessed 13 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942747

Whayne, Jeannie. "No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 1, 2017, p. 213+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481354186&it=r. Accessed 13 May 2017. Klink, A.W. "Greene, Alison Collis: No depression in heaven: the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the transformation of religion in the Delta." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1488. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942747&it=r. Accessed 13 May 2017

• H Net - H-South
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  Schilling on Greene, 'No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta'

  Author:
  Alison Collis Greene
  Reviewer:
  Ryan Schilling

  Alison Collis Greene. No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 336 pp. $27.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-937187-7.

  Reviewed by Ryan Schilling (Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College)
  Published on H-South (November, 2016)
  Commissioned by Jay Richardson

  Much has been written about both the New Deal and American religious conservativism. Explored to a significantly lesser degree, however, are the links between the growth of the state in the 1930s and the rise of modern Christian fundamentalism. In No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta, Alison Collis Greene, a historian at Mississippi State University, examines the religious cultures of the Deep South during the early twentieth century to expose a transitionary role of the church during that period and an increased antagonism between congregations and the national government.

  Unique in its deep-seated Protestant devotion, racial tensions, and economic distress, Memphis, along with the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta, offers a constructive case study of the relationship between the New Deal and religion. Once the main regional supplier of charity, churches found themselves financially overwhelmed by the needs of the Great Depression, and in many cases they called for a greater role for the federal government as a relief agent. Nevertheless, as Washington assumed influence that was unprecedented in the American experience, many clergy fought back when they considered the lessening of their own power in their communities and the potential decline of Jim Crow segregation.

  Greene emphasizes that there was not one church culture in the Delta, but many, as diverse as the geography they represented. Indeed, congregations in Memphis and the neighboring region were typically defined as rich or poor, white or black, and urban or rural, rather than by a common theology. They were further distinguished as liberal congregations who embraced the social gospel, conservative congregations who resisted it for a focus on redemption, socialist Christians who hoped to eliminate plantation capitalism, and apocalyptic believers who predicted Christ’s return, occasionally suggesting that the Great Depression was sign of the coming end of times. Additionally, Jewish and Catholic groups stood out as models for providing for the financial, social, and spiritual needs of their congregations. Far from being homogenous, the Delta was home to a myriad of religious groups, reflecting both social status and differing interpretations of the church’s responsibility in addressing contemporary challenges.

  Part 1 places the economic history of the Delta in a pre-Depression context. Greene argues that the business culture and racial caste system can be traced to Andrew Jackson’s removal of American Indians from the region, which was soon followed by a migration of whites and their slaves. These eastern transplants established a cotton economy in Mississippi and logging enterprises in Arkansas. The author later presents the post-Civil War Delta as a bastion of poverty and racial segregation, where sharecroppers rarely enjoyed opportunities to escape debt. Furthermore, floods, tornados, and malnutrition made the Delta a uniquely dire place for those who called it home. Memphis, however, provided the chance to escape poverty, and for African Americans to become business owners and live in thriving black enclaves. Still, Memphis’s prospects were accompanied by challenges, such as yellow fever epidemics, high homicide rates, and corruption at the hand of the notorious city boss, Ed Crump. Truly, Delta life was ever trying, yet 1930-1932 were exceptionally ruinous years, as a drought plagued the country, hundreds of banks closed in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee, and credit was often denied to farmers. Consequently, tithing declined, leaving churches void of resources that their suffering congregants needed.

  Part 2 examines the influences of race and class on religious culture. The Delta poor, often transient and rarely accepted by their upper- and middle-income peers, often established their own religious traditions. The churches of the impoverished were unique in their resistance to record keeping and building construction, as well as their acceptance of female pastors and lay leadership. Establishment denominations with large middle-class and wealthy congregations (such as Baptists and Methodists) often touted their role as reformers by lobbying for Prohibition, promoting public education, and garnering support for World War I. Many of these devotees to public morality attributed the Great Depression to the 1920s, with its challenge to gender norms, Wall Street speculation, and illegal liquor consumption. They assumed that the pain of the thirties was retribution for the sins of the twenties, so the best remedies for the economic crises were revival and redemption. In contrast, African American and Catholic congregations were more likely to link the Great Depression to Jim Crow laws and immoral plantation capitalism and the inequality it bore.

  In part 3, Greene presents the expansive role of the state under the New Deal and religious responses. She draws upon a plethora of letters of correspondence between southern pastors and President Roosevelt and concludes that, despite a general sense of loss of power by the legalization of alcohol under the Twenty-First Amendment, most pastors initially supported New Deal relief, often praising its adherence to Judeo-Christian principles. Jim Crow politics are also prevalent in the letters to the White House, with white pastors seeking to reinforce segregation culture through the distribution of federal benefits and African American preachers voicing concern that New Deal opportunities were not equally accessible for blacks in some instances and not available at all in others. Furthermore, some pastors demanded greater power in administering New Deal benefits as a means to maintain and strengthen regional influence. In response to this perceived threat to pastoral power, even conservative churches that traditionally shunned charity suddenly claimed that the state was moving too far into the religious sphere. For example, a Southern Baptist named Plautus Lipsey protested, “must the government do our religious work for us,” even though he was a known critic of the social gospel (p. 12). “The ongoing expansion of the state under the New Deal,” Greene ultimately concludes, “forced religious leaders to rethink the place and power of the church and its relationship to the federal government” (p. 133).

  The final part of No Depression in Heaven reveals that, by 1938, Christian fundamentalists had come to identify the church as the rival of the state. Southern Baptists in particular saw themselves as defenders against government entrenchment into the religious sphere. As a result, Southern Baptists fought earnestly to prevent any government money from entering their domain, going so far as to deny their college students any National Youth Administration relief. The denomination also refused to provide church employees with Social Security benefits. In 1939, the Northern, Southern, and National Baptist denominations united to present “The American Baptist Bill of Rights,” which according to Greene, “renewed the call for separation of church and state that many Baptists feared denominational leaders had abandoned with the arrival of the New Deal” (p. 191).

  Central to church leaders’ abandonment of the New Deal was the fear that the growing federal power would challenge Jim Crow segregation laws. “For white southerners,” Greene reveals, “claims about the New Deal’s encroachment on religious liberty often masked concern over federal interference in their racial caste system” (p. 191). In 1939, for example, the Methodist Church officially established racially specific churches as a matter of doctrine, an attempt to combat potential moves by the national government to integrate the South.

  Greene leans on a large variety of sources to examine the rifts between Delta fundamentalism and the state that developed in the 1930s, including oral histories, church records, the Federal Writers Project’s works on Mississippi and Arkansas, and US Census records. She utilizes periodicals as diverse as the Mississippi Baptist Record, Prophetic Religion, and Baltimore Afro-American. By appealing to evidence from these sources, along with an impressive array of archival materials from Hyde Park, the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, the University of North Carolina’s Southern Historical Collection, and the National Archives she offers a well-written and captivating narrative. Furthermore, No Depression in Heaven’s appendix includes an informative and useful list of religious denominations throughout the Delta, along with their geography, racial makeup, and history.

  No Depression in Heaven adds substantially to our historical understanding of political and religious transformations in the Delta during the Great Depression. By exposing the evolution of church reactions to federal aid, from an initial welcoming response to growing skepticism and antagonism, Greene delivers a broader revelation of post-Depression fundamentalism. Because the Delta is arguably the most impoverished, racially divided, and religiously devoted region of the country, it likewise provides the ideal model for social and theological transitions during one of the most consequential periods of American history. Greene’s compelling narrative and innovative approach to the roots of modern fundamentalism make No Depression in Heaven extraordinarily beneficial to political, southern, and religious historians.

  Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=47153

  Citation: Ryan Schilling. Review of Greene, Alison Collis, No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta. H-South, H-Net Reviews. November, 2016.
  URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=47153

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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• Reading Religion
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  No Depression in Heaven
  The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta
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  Alison Collis Greene
  New York, NY: Oxford University Press , December 2015. 336 pages.
  $34.95. Hardcover. ISBN 9780199371877. For other formats: Link to Publisher's Website.
  Review
  Alison Collis Greene’s No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta delivers even more than its ambitious title promises. While it is decidedly a history—the appendix and notes make up a third of the text—it is also a framework for understanding contemporary arguments about the current and future state of the social safety net and an argument for the importance of the study of history for today’s politicians and church leaders.

  Greene’s story focuses on the Delta region, an area of Arkansas, Tennessee, and Mississippi which was already reeling with the effects of flooding and drought by the time the stock market crashed in 1929. Post-Reconstruction, the Delta was a stronghold of both black and white Protestantism and white supremacy. It continues to be one of the most religious regions in the nation, even as the people there face continued poverty, epidemic methamphetamine addiction, poor health outcomes, and inequities rooted in racial disparity. The city of Memphis, regularly filling with and then emptying of residents from the rural counties around it, maintains its reputation as one of the most dangerous cities in the United States. Greene tells the story of the Depression’s ravaging of the region with respect for the people, and deep engagement with the economic, political, and cultural factors that shaped why the Depression, and its aftermath, took the shape they did there.

  Indeed, while No Depression in Heaven is a history of how religion changed in the Delta, it is also a thoughtful reminder of how interpersonal and structural racism, capitalism and economics, environmental degradation, and national, state, and local politics worked together to create a society marked by economic disparity and its attendant human suffering—hunger and malnutrition chief among them—all kept in place by white supremacy, and specifically anti-black terrorism. The Depression, which exposed some of the trouble with loosely regulated markets, had the potential to disrupt these patterns. Religion was one institution of life in the Delta which had to respond to the overwhelming changes economic disaster wrought.

  In her analysis of religion of the region, Greene, a professor at Mississippi State University, excels without overwhelming non-specialists with granular details. (As evidence of this, of the twenty-eight abbreviations defined in the front matter of the book, more refer to New Deal programs than to religious organizations.) She crafts a text that will be accessible to scholars in a wide range of fields, including U.S. history, economic history, cultural history, and geography; heritage studies; American studies; and Southern studies. In her focus on religion, Greene begins with a point of fact: the scope of economic turmoil during the Great Depression was unparalleled, even in a region familiar with poverty, so that, in the words of one native of the region, “the hungry fought the hungrier over already gnawed bones” (15). Religious institutions, which had served as a main dispenser of relief, as well as moral instruction, (and shaming) of the poor, were broke. Churches could not meet congregants’ needs, much less the needs of those outside their doors. With their own funds depleted, churches lost some sense of authority in their communities. Additionally, the widespread nature of the disaster exposed the fact that poverty was not a consequence of immorality, but one of environmental factors (floods and droughts) and market forces (a reliance on cotton that kept tenant farmers planting cotton up to their front doors, with no room to grow their own food) and economic structures (plummeting stock markets, bank closings, disappearing credit) that went far beyond an individual's control. As the Depression reverberated up the economic hierarchy, it became harder to blame “lazy” or “irresponsible” or “immoral” poor people for their troubles.

  In this way, government relief was a great relief, financially and otherwise, to both black and white churches, which broadly supported the New Deal. Yet this support came at a cost for white churches: they lost the sole right to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving poor—a power wielded to maintain white supremacy. As the government stepped in, it became a competitor for control and authority over locals’ lives. Additionally, white establishment Protestants lost power as other groups—black Baptists and Methodists, Catholics, Memphis’s Jewish population, and the growing Pentecostal and charismatic groups, including the Church of God in Christ, which was born in the region—stepped forward to fill the social, spiritual, and financial gaps that establishment Protestants could not.

  In the end, not all religious leaders were happy with the deal they had struck or the way that the New Deal had transformed the relationship between citizen and government, illustrated most starkly in the Delta, but occurring all over the nation. The people, writes Greene, “looked to God, and then they looked to Roosevelt” (2). While Roosevelt left much of the dispersion of relief to local officials (white authorities who continued to favor whites), a new consciousness about labor and the ability, and indeed duty, of the government to intervene began to form. The Delta became the place where, against a backdrop of terrorism, black and white tenant farmers banded together to unionize and demand change. Government intervention had proven that social change was possible. By the end of the decade, as the country began to recover, many establishment leaders turned against the policies which had relieved the region’s mass suffering, understanding that, with the worst behind them, they no longer had to risk losing social control. Thus began the work of crafting “the myth of the redemptive Depression” (194), praising the Depression generation for their grit, rather than seeing the recovery as the work of relatively effective state intervention and a budding welfare system. Greene’s goal is to bring that second story, which highlights the suffering of those most vulnerable, forward again. In light of the summer 2016 flooding that has destroyed large parts of Louisiana, a state where voters have broadly accepted rhetoric against federal intervention, in part because of fear that federal intervention could dismantle racial hierarchies, this goal is especially important.

  About the Reviewer(s):
  Rebecca Barrett-Fox is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Arkansas State University.

  Date of Review:
  August 31, 2016
  About the Author(s)/Editor(s)/Translator(s):
  Alison Collis Greene is Assistant Professor of History at Mississippi State University.

  Categories: economics history politics 20th century United States and Canada Christianity
  Keywords: Great Depression, New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt

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  No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta . By Alison Collis Greene
  No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta . By Alison Collis Greene ( Oxford and New York : Oxford University Press , 2016 . xvi plus 317 pp. $35.00).
  Darren Dochuk
  J Soc Hist shw096. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shw096
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  For the past decade, shaped by current fascinations with the Christian, corporate Right, historians have concentrated their scholarship on probusiness dynamics in the South’s (and nation’s) pulpits and pews. While invested in this inquiry, Alison Collis Greene pursues a different goal. In her well-orchestrated book, she seeks to elucidate the phenomenal range of attitudes toward markets, governance, God, and the common good that once made the South a hothouse for many gospels. Amid the crises of the Depression, one particularly embattled sector of this region—the Mississippi Delta—nurtured a vast repertoire of political visions and daring and creative dreams of a future in which the interests of hard-working, God-fearing people could rule.

  Collis Greene offers four claims, each of which play on the interpretive flexibility of her book’s title. First, she argues that the Depression transformed the political soul of the South; blighted by failing farms, families, and economies, Delta residents searched for redemption in new places. “It was time for a higher power to intervene,” they believed, and so “They looked to God, and then they looked to Roosevelt” (2). No longer able to save the poor or themselves through old-fashioned voluntarism, Delta residents “re-envisioned the relationship between church and state and re-evaluated the responsibilities of each for the welfare of the nation and its people” (3). Amid reassessment, Collis Greene asserts, churchgoers sought escape from the Depression in a dizzying array of movements, most of which placed trust in Washington. Although right-wing backlash also emerged from this mix, she stresses the contingencies and “striking religious, ethnic, and political diversity” of experience that made the eventual rise of the southern Religious Right no sure thing (3).

  Collis Greene’s second evocation of her title relates to this point: that the troubled Thirties sparked a spiritual fervor that transcended traditional boundaries. Depression had no decisive hold over people, for theirs was an irrepressible zeal focused on heaven. Collis Greene shines when describing this fervor, and revealing the myriad means rank-and-file Delta citizens, black and white, embraced to address society’s trials. With the flare of a novelist and the urgency of a reformer, she guides the reader through grassroots America’s encounter with catastrophe, pausing frequently to underscore common people’s burdens but also to highlight their resilience and empowerment in the fight for survival. Gospel music, folk hymns, and the blues; fire-and-brimstone revivalism, fist-pounding preaching, and led-by-the-spirit Pentecostal worship; “social gospels,” in which a human Jesus was held high as an example of civil service, and “socialist gospels,” in which a radical Jesus occupied center stage: “In this multitude of ways large and small,” Collis Greene submits, the Delta’s denizens calibrated a faith in the divine to their needs and desires in the here-and-now (47). Her careful and poignant rendering of this process and the ravaged local contexts in which they unfolded (from the streets of Memphis to the cotton farms of Mississippi County, Arkansas) is social history at its best.

  To her credit, Collis Greene also carefully and poignantly maps out the ways that the Delta’s “religious elites”—wealthy Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Southern Baptists—responded to the Depression with their own bundle of interests and innovations, as men and women shaken by their “faltering social power and moral authority” (5). In this third facet she shows how some of these elites combatted social dislocation by encouraging a progressive politics of reconstruction. “Many liberals and moderates,” she explains, “found a home in the New Deal coalition, often as agents of the state rather than of the church. They helped to shape New Deal policy and in so doing forged tenuous relationships with the region’s displaced black and white sharecroppers and the Christian socialists who publicized their cause” (7). These liberalizing Protestants refashioned New Testament teachings (at Vanderbilt School of Religion, for instance) and remade biblical principles of social welfare (through the Memphis Council of Social Agencies, for example) into a comprehensive blueprint for social justice and civil rights movements, which would spread after World War II.

  For all of their collective efforts, these liberal elites ultimately failed to transform their region their way. Here Collis Greene offers yet a fourth reading of “No Depression in Heaven.” It is, in her opinion, the darkest meaning of the term. By the late 1930s, she writes, “conservative elites within the southern Protestant establishment had already begun to rewrite the story of the Great Depression” in a way that downplayed the people’s suffering, the church’s failings, and the federal government’s much-needed and welcomed assistance (7). “No more” was Roosevelt’s New Deal heralded “as the embodiment of biblical ideals” (7). Collis Greene details why and how the South’s conservative base, consisting of many establishment Protestants as well as fringe fundamentalists, began to write the Depression and New Deal out of their narratives of true Christianity. Anxious to prop up a white racial order, worried about an expanding secular state, informed by a new premillennialist eschatology, which spoke of Washington in apocalyptic and adversarial terms: these and other factors fueled the Delta’s shift from support for to disdain of Roosevelt. In the late twentieth century, Collis Greene laments, conservatives eager to “dismantle the welfare state” finalized this storyline by “recast[ing] the Depression era as an idyllic world where the deserving poor, left to their own devices, would find their way out of misery without government help” (200). Whereas partnership with Washington once characterized the political and religious lives of the South’s devout, dogged antistatism now rules. “Gone are the careful negotiations between church and state, and the willingness to try new solutions to economic and social crises. What remains,” she bemoans, “is a nation haunted by a past it refuses to remember” (201).

  Passionately written, Collis Greene’s book is a bold attempt to erase this amnesia and prompt readers—southern ones especially—to learn about a time when church folks considered Washington more savior than Satan. As stellar history, rigorously researched and analyzed, it is a refreshing call for scholars to reorient their concerns away from the rigidities of the current moment, which paint the South solely as conservative hegemon, to the dynamism of an earlier day when the region served as a test-case for new directions in governance, civil society, and the church.

  © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

• Journal of Southern Religion
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  Review: No Depression in Heaven
  Jarod Roll
  Jarod Roll is Associate Professor of History at the University of Mississippi.

  JSRVolume 18
  Cite this Article
  Jarod Roll, "Review: No Depression in Heaven," Journal of Southern Religion (18) (2016): wp.jsreligion.org/vol18/roll.

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  Alison Collis Greene. No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 317 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-937187-7.

  Publisher's Website

  In this superb historical study of how religious groups in Memphis and its Delta hinterland responded to the Great Depression, Alison Collis Greene argues that the catastrophes of the 1930s realigned the relationship between moral authority and the politics of capitalism in the South. When the region’s dominant religious institutions, mostly Protestant, failed to meet the material needs of the destitute, they lost moral and social authority to an increasingly powerful New Deal state that many lay believers viewed as heaven-sent. “Instead of driving people to the churches,” Greene demonstrates, “the Great Depression drove the church to the state” (194). Yet, as the church establishment endured a crisis of leadership, other groups seized new opportunities to gain power and influence—some, like the Church of God in Christ, by using federal programs, and others, like fundamentalists, by blaming federal programs for the crisis itself. According to Greene, by 1940 these fractures had yielded a political realignment within southern religion that would last for decades to come.

  Importantly, Greene begins by reminding us that many southern churches actually embraced the politics of social welfare before the Depression. Indeed, she provides overwhelming evidence that white Protestants believed that the economic crisis would enhance their power in the public realm. In the decade after the Great War, more than ever before, they had claimed responsibility over social problems and pushed solutions through local and state governments. The Protestant establishment sought better public schools, more attention to public health, less racial violence, and, most importantly, a prohibition on the alcohol trade. Greene rightly emphasizes that Prohibition “represented for many churchgoers both an affirmation of their political power and a necessary step toward the government’s incorporation of Protestant moral imperatives” (108). She is careful to show, however, that their power rested atop a social and economic hierarchy that relied on the profits of plantation capitalism that linked Memphis to the cotton fields in the surrounding lowlands. The wealthiest religious groups in the crisis-prone region built charitable organizations that stood ready to aid the needy if the needy were judged deserving, a determination that almost always adhered to hierarchies of social class, gender, and race. As Greene makes clear, their moral authority shaped government intervention on behalf of the poor, but in ways that reinforced elite control of the exploitative plantation system.

  As the worsening crisis decimated rural people throughout the cotton country, these religious institutions were at first unwilling but soon unable to help as unprecedented numbers of people faced destitution, homelessness, and, in many cases, starvation. Despite rationing relief to those deemed most deserving, even the richest religious organizations quickly exhausted their resources. Rural churches fared far worse. As Greene shows in painstaking detail, “the Great Depression thus exposed the inability—and often the unwillingness—of religious and voluntary organizations to address the suffering that surrounded them” (68).

  As a consequence, Greene argues, most southerners welcomed the New Deal’s assertion of moral authority in 1933 and 1934. Poor southerners, both African American and white, viewed President Roosevelt as an answer to their prayers, and many considered him a religious figure in his own right. Despite the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the leaders of the religious establishment also cheered New Deal intervention as they ceded the duties of social relief to government agencies. Some mainstream leaders considered New Deal programs an extension of their own social reform efforts, which was easy to do, since elite whites controlled so many of the local agencies that actually administered federal initiatives. Even on the margins, figures as removed from one another as fundamentalist J. Frank Norris and social gospeler Alva Taylor both approved, at least initially.

  According to Greene, such accord unraveled as the Roosevelt administration excluded religious organizations as agents for its largest relief programs, beginning with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and Federal Emergency Relief Administration in 1933. With no formal voice in federal programs, she argues, these groups lost control over questions of political economy. While elite whites might run New Deal agencies that carefully maintained their social control, Greene makes the novel and exciting argument that the programs themselves redistributed the moral authority that mainstream religious groups had once claimed to those long subsumed in southern racial and class hierarchies. Groups like the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union now rose to demand not only stronger but fairer government programs for those caught in the plantation economy. As a result, she shows, “members of the Protestant establishment had to share their place in welfare and reform not only with the federal government, whose help they had sought, but also with their religious rivals in the region,” as well as emboldened critics “of the South’s racial and economic order” (193).

  What resulted, Greene concludes, was a fragmentation of local religious authority amid divided views of how churches should respond to the government’s new reform role. African American churches continued to advocate for fairness, a trajectory that would lead to the Civil Rights Movement. Some white religious supporters of the New Deal remained. By the end of the 1930s, however, white Protestants increasingly viewed the state’s moral power as a threat to their own authority and turned against it. Many of these believers, Greene writes, would find “common cause with fundamentalist and corporate conservatives who had denounced federal intervention in social welfare from the start” (195). Unlike in the 1920s, however, their efforts to regain moral authority in politics would not include any claims of responsibility for the negative consequences of capitalism.

  With No Depression in Heaven, Greene makes a powerful addition to a growing literature on the relationship between religion and political economy in the South, and in the United States in general, in the modern era.1 This beautifully written, deeply researched book is aimed primarily at historians of religion and politics, but will be of interest to anyone concerned with the moral dimensions of political economy.

  1 Excellent recent examples of this scholarship include, Darren E. Grem, The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2016); Christopher D. Cantwell, Heath W. Carter, and Janine Giordano Drake, eds., Between the Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class (University of Illinois Press, 2016); Kevin J. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic Books, 2015); Heath W. Carter, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (Oxford University Press, 2015); and Ken Fones-Wolf and Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Struggle for the Soul of the South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie (University of Illinois Press, 2015).

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