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WORK TITLE: Cracking the Solid South
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.leecdunn.com
CITY: Atlanta
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016017534
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016017534
HEADING: Dunn, Lee C., 1949-
000 00671nz a2200109n 450
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008 160331n| azannaabn |n aaa
010 __ |a n 2016017534
040 __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC
100 1_ |a Dunn, Lee C., |d 1949-
670 __ |a Cracking the solid South, 2016: |b eCIP t.p. (Lee C. Dunn) data view screen (has researched and spoken about Southern history, garden and landscape history, and genealogy for more than twenty years; has been deeply involved in promoting the preservation and awareness of Southern gardens and landscapes for fifteen years though The Garden Club of Georgia and the Southern Garden History Society; she lives in Atlanta, Georgia)
PERSONAL
Born 1949; married; husband’s name Mike; two sons.
EDUCATION:Graduate of Pierce College and Historic Landscape Institute at University of Virginia.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Worked as columnist for Black Forest News, Colorado Springs, CO.
MEMBER:Garden Club of Georgia; board member for Cherokee Garden Library at Atlanta History Center; and Southern Garden History Society.
AWARDS:Inducted into Sigma Pi Kappa Honor Society, University of Georgia.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Lee C. Dunn, a specialist in Southern history, tells the story of a regional innovator in Cracking the Solid South: The Life of John Fletcher Hanson, Father of Georgia Tech. Hanson was a native Georgian and minister’s son who, after serving as a major in the Confederate Army in the Civil War, became an advocate for industrialization of the South. He was involved in a variety of businesses, owning several textile mills, founding a hydroelectric power company, and eventually buying a newspaper, the Macon Telegraph. Through the Telegraph he lobbied for industrialization and exposed politicians he considered corrupt. He was friendly with some politicians, however, and he persuaded State Representative Nathaniel Harris to introduce a bill in the legislature to establish a technical college in Georgia. The bill failed in 1882 but passed in 1885, and three years later the Georgia School of Technology (later Georgia Institute of Technology) opened in Atlanta. Drawing on many primary sources, Dunn chronicles Hanson’s key tole in the creation of Georgia Tech, his personal life, and his stances on the political issues of the day. The South was then almost exclusively Democratic, but Hanson believed both major parties needed to be competitive in the region, and in the 1880s he joined the Republican Party. He held more progressive views than many of his fellow Southerners; for instance, he supported equal rights for African-Americans. His politics did not sit well with his contemporaries, and this perhaps explains why he eventually was largely forgotten.
Some reviewers thought Dunn succeeded in rescuing Hanson from obscurity. “In Cracking the Solid South, Lee Dunn has done for Hanson what the Major did for southern industry,” remarked Chris Meyers in the online Civil War Book Review. “She has made Hanson a recognized figure and provided historians with a more forward thinking alternative to Henry Grady,” the editor of the Atlanta Constitution and another post-Civil War industrialization advocate. In the Journal of Southern History, Michael E. Williams, Sr., called Cracking the Solid South “a good overview of an important yet overlooked figure.” He added: “The book is primarily descriptive, and this reviewer would have preferred more analysis of Hanson’s significance in the broader southern and national culture.” Still, he noted, Dunn “should be commended for making a solid contribution to New South literature with this biography.” Meyers summed up the volume as “comprehensively researched” and “a significant contribution to our knowledge of the postwar industrialization movement in Georgia and the South.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, August, 2017, Michael E. Williams, Sr., review of Cracking the Solid South: The Life of John Fletcher Hanson, Father of Georgia Tech, p. 720.
ONLINE
Civil War Book Review, http://www.cwbr.com/ (January 7, 2018), Chris Meyers, “The New South Expanded.”
Lee C. Dunn Website, https://www.leecdunn.com (January 7, 2018).
Mercer University Press Website, http://www.mupress.org/ (January 7, 2018), brief biography.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lee Dunn has researched southern history, garden and landscape history, and genealogy for over twenty years. She has been deeply involved in promoting the preservation and awareness of southern gardens and landscapes for seventeen years, through her service as a leader in The Garden Club of Georgia’s historic landscape preservation efforts, and was inducted into UGA’s Sigma Pi Kappa Honor Society in recognition of her leadership achievement in historic preservation of Georgia’s cultural landscapes.
Current civic involvements include serving as chairman of The Garden Club of Georgia’s Historic Landscape Preservation committee; on the board of trustees and acquisitions committee of the Cherokee Garden Library at the Atlanta History Center; and as a board member of the Southern Garden History Society.
She was a columnist for the Black Forest News in Colorado Springs, Colorado in her early career. Her weekly column covered city government, school board issues, and other community events. Lee is a graduate of Pierce College and the Historic Landscape Institute at the University of Virginia. She lives in Atlanta with her husband Mike. They have two sons and two grandsons also in the Atlanta area.
Lee C. Dunn
Lee C. Dunn has researched and spoken about Southern history, garden and landscape history, and genealogy for more than twenty years. She has been deeply involved in promoting the preservation and awareness of Southern gardens and landscapes for fifteen years though The Garden Club of Georgia and the Southern Garden History Society. Dunn lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Quoted in Sidelights: “a good overview of an important yet overlooked figure.” “The book is primarily descriptive, and this reviewer would have preferred more analysis of Hanson’s significance in the broader southern and national culture.” “should be commended for making a solid contribution to New South literature with this biography.”
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Print Marked Items
Cracking the Solid South: The Life of
John Fletcher Hanson, Father of
Georgia Tech
Michael E. Williams, Sr.
Journal of Southern History.
83.3 (Aug. 2017): p720+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Cracking the Solid South: The Life of John Fletcher Hanson, Father of Georgia Tech. By Lee C.
Dunn. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2016. Pp. xxxii, 269. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-
526-4.)
Many historians of the Reconstruction era and of the New South in Georgia will recognize
names like Henry W. Grady, John B. Gordon, and Thomas E. Watson. Not nearly as many will
recognize the man who challenged their political hegemony, John Fletcher Hanson. Lee C.
Dunn, in this fine biography of the man she styles the "Father of Georgia Tech," introduces
readers to Hanson and discusses his life in rich detail. Like many New South advocates, Hanson
sought to create a diversified economy that would overcome the region's overwhelming
dependence on agriculture. Hanson, however, differed from many of his era in how he
envisioned that this diversified economy should be achieved.
Dunn begins with an overview of Hanson's family background and service in the Confederate
army during the Civil War, followed by a chapter on Hanson's emergence as a civic leader and
his endeavors in the textile industry and the newspaper business. The next chapters focus on
Hanson's ongoing battle in Georgia politics with the Atlanta Ring, led by newspaper rival Henry
Grady of the Atlanta Constitution, and formidable Georgia politicians Joseph E. Brown, Alfred
H. Colquitt, and John B. Gordon. Dunn clearly demonstrates that, even though Hanson failed in
most of his political challenges to the insiders' control of the Democratic Party in the South, his
efforts did not go for naught.
In chapter 5 Dunn discusses Hanson's efforts to establish Georgia Tech. Recognizing the dearth
of engineers and technically skilled workers in the South, Hanson used his newspaper editorials
and considerable speaking skills to advocate for reforms in higher education. He also fought
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successfully to create a separate institution rather than enlarging the scope of the University of
Georgia. She accurately identifies that Georgia Tech was merely one facet of Hanson's
comprehensive efforts regarding the development of a truly new South. Successive chapters
build on this theme, including Hanson's fight for a protective tariff, long the bane of southern
agriculturists, and his largely unsuccessful struggles to develop and maintain a true two-party
political system in the South, even switching to the Republican Party and becoming a confidant
of President William McKinley. Dunn also shows how Hanson's formerly progressive attitudes
regarding issues such as child labor began to change. Hanson came to regard such reforms as
matters of government interference rather than as opportunities for progress. She concludes with
a short epilogue summarizing the personal difficulties that Hanson experienced in his final years.
Cracking the Solid South: The Life of John Fletcher Hanson, Father of Georgia Tech is a good
overview of an important yet overlooked figure in southern history. The book is primarily
descriptive, and this reviewer would have preferred more analysis of Hanson's significance in the
broader southern and national culture. Dunn does some of this work, particularly with regard to
tariff issues and changes in the Republ ican Party in the South, but she fails to analyze Hanson's
role at Georgia Tech in the broader context of southern education during the era. She would have
done well to compare what Hanson advocated at Georgia Tech with what occurred at Louisiana
State University, Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University), and other institutions,
as outlined in Dan R. Frost's Thinking Confederates: Academia and the Idea of Progress in the
New South (Knoxville, 2000). While Dunn does deal with Hanson and his fairly progressive
attitudes on race for that time, she might have done more with this topic. Finally, she has done
tremendous research in primary documents, especially considering that Hanson left behind no
personal papers or correspondence. However, Dunn would have strengthened her book if she had
analyzed Hanson against the backdrop of some of the recent studies of the New South and the
Progressive era in the secondary literature.
These criticisms aside, Dunn and Mercer University Press should be commended for making a
solid contribution to New South literature with this biography. Those interested in Georgia
history will find this work especially helpful.
Michael E. Williams Sr.
Dallas Baptist University
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Williams, Michael E., Sr. "Cracking the Solid South: The Life of John Fletcher Hanson, Father
of Georgia Tech." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2017, p. 720+. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501078167/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=114ecddc. Accessed 24 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501078167
Quoted in Sidelights: “In Cracking the Solid South, Lee Dunn has done for Hanson what the Major did for southern industry. She has made Hanson a recognized figure and provided historians with a more forward thinking alternative to Henry Grady,”
“comprehensively researched” “a significant contribution to our knowledge of the postwar industrialization movement in Georgia and the South.”
Cracking the Solid South: The Life of John Fletcher Hanson, Father of Georgia Tech
by Dunn, Lee C.
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Retail Price: $35.00
Issue: Winter 2017
ISBN: 9780881465624
The New South Expanded
Conventional wisdom (and history books) tells us that Henry W. Grady was the most outspoken person in favor of post-Civil War industrialization in the South. With Lee C. Dunn’s book Cracking the Solid South: The Life of John Fletcher Hanson, Father of Georgia Tech we can now include another Georgian, John Hanson, in that conversation. Born in 1840 in Barnesville, Georgia, not much is known about Hanson’s childhood, though Dunn surmises Hanson’s education consisted of reading newspapers and the Bible (his father was a minister) and attending the old-field schools. When the Civil War broke out in 1861 Hanson enlisted as a private in the Spalding Grays, which later became part of the 2nd Georgia Battalion. When the 53rd Georgia Infantry Regiment was formed in May 1862 Hanson was commissioned adjutant with the rank of major. For the remainder of his life Hanson was referred to as Major. In this capacity Hanson fought in several major battles in the Virginia theatre of the war, including the Peninsula Campaign, the Seven Days’ Battles, Antietam, and Chancellorsville. Just a few days after Chancellorsville, in May 1863, Hanson resigned from the Confederate Army for medical reasons; a surgeon’s letter stated he suffered from nephritis and calculus, though years later Hanson claimed chronic bronchitis as the reason he resigned. Whatever the malady, he sat out the rest of the war.
It is in the postwar period though that Major Hanson established himself as an advocate for southern industrialization. Dunn describes Hanson as “an industrialist and visionary,” and that he “personified the phoenix who rose from the ashes, becoming a leading Georgia advocate of the New South in the aftermath of the Civil War” (pg. 2). What perhaps makes Hanson stand out is that he was not just a spokesman for industrialization, he practiced what he preached. At the peak of his career he controlled nine mills that manufactured hosiery, twine, cording, yarn, coarse fabrics, and fine Egyptian cotton fabrics. In addition to his textile interests Hanson founded the Columbus Power Company to generate hydroelectric power and presided over the Central of Georgia Railway and the Ocean Steamship Company (a subsidiary of the railway). Add to that his leadership role in the creation of a technological school in the state, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Hanson surpasses all others in preaching and practicing the New South industrial gospel.
Settling in Barnesville after the war, Hanson’s entrepreneurial side emerged and he began a furniture enterprise with support and funding from Cyrus Wakefield of Massachusetts. It is significant to note his financial support came from the North, money being largely unavailable in the postwar South. In order to support his growing family Hanson got involved in a brick business and was an agent for the North American Life Insurance Company. In addition, Hanson formed a partnership in 1868 to run a warehouse to store cotton, and formed a similar partnership with his father for the same purpose. Always the hard worker, Dunn states that the Major held seven different jobs in Barnesville. In 1871 Hanson and his family moved to Macon, the heart of the cotton trade in Middle Georgia.
Hanson’s move to Macon put him in the center of the cotton business in that part of the state and Hanson quickly became a commission merchant; also called cotton factors, merchants bought and sold cotton on commission. In his work as a merchant Hanson discovered an abandoned warehouse, which he purchased in 1876 along with his brother and Hugh Comer, a cotton merchant in Savannah. Their plan to open a textile factory came to fruition on September 15, 1876 with the opening of Bibb Manufacturing. In addition to textiles, Bibb was also a gristmill, though the textile portion of the factory was more profitable and eventually took over the entire property. In short order Hanson and his partners purchased a failing factory out of foreclosure and called it Bibb Mill No.2; the original Bibb premises was called Bibb Mill No. 1. By the fall of 1878 Bibb boasted 220 employees, and in five years (1876-1881) Bibb’s value doubled. This was the beginning of Hanson becoming a leader of the postwar industrial movement in Georgia and the South.
In 1881 Hanson diversified his business enterprises by purchasing the Macon Telegraph and becoming the managing editor. The Telegraph became an avenue through which Hanson could espouse his belief in industrialization and his desire to fight political corruption. In the latter cause he tangled with Henry Grady, the Atlanta Ring, and Grady’s Atlanta Constitution. While both men supported industrialization in the South, their general outlook differed and they disagreed on many political issues of the day. Grady, though forward thinking on the southern economy, tended to look backwards on other issues, such as supporting a one-party system in the South, opposing equality for African Americans, and coming out against tariff reform. Hanson, on the other hand, supported equality for blacks, came out for tariff reform, and endorsed a two-party system in the South. In fact, he became a Republican in the 1880s and supported Benjamin Harrison in the 1888 presidential election (for which he was considered for a cabinet post). For his position on these issues Hanson was branded a heretic in much of the South, which perhaps explains his anonymity to history.
Another avenue Hanson pursued in his support of industrialization in Georgia and the South was the creation of a technological school in the state, a cause he championed in the pages of the Telegraph. The Major knew that if Georgia was to be competitive industrially, the state needed an institution to train students in chemical, mechanical, textile, and electrical engineering. Besides, he needed trained foremen for his factories. Hanson began his editorial campaign for this kind of institution in March 1882. A second approach Hanson used was to lobby the state legislature, and his conduit was Macon Representative Nathaniel Harris, who won a seat in the state House in 1882. Through Harris the legislature created a committee to study the issue of technological education in Georgia. The committee visited numerous campuses, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before recommending the creation of a technological school. For his part, Hanson personally lobbied both houses of the legislature in support of the bill to create this institution. Despite the committee’s report and Hanson’s efforts, the legislature did not pass the bill. Undaunted, Harris reintroduced the bill in 1885 and the Major continued to lobby the legislature. This time their efforts were rewarded with success, as the bill passed and the governor signed it on October 13, 1885. A year later Atlanta was chosen as the location for the school, and two years after that, on October 5, 1888, the Georgia School of Technology (later Georgia Institute of Technology) held its formal opening. Hanson’s role in the creation of Georgia Tech should not be underestimated; a former vice-provost of academic affairs at Georgia Tech wrote this about Hanson: “More than any other individual, John F. Hanson deserves to be remembered as Georgia Tech’s founder and the creator of its tradition of promoting economic development through technological education” (pg. 104). Hanson is honored on campus with a student dormitory named for him.
The creation of Georgia Tech is probably the crowning achievement in John Hanson’s career in bringing industry to Georgia and the South. In Cracking the Solid South, Lee Dunn has done for Hanson what the Major did for southern industry. She has made Hanson a recognized figure and provided historians with a more forward thinking alternative to Henry Grady. On the postwar industrialization of Georgia and the South Hanson should now be mentioned equally with Grady. The book is comprehensively researched and put together well with a section of photographs relevant to Hanson. It is a significant contribution to our knowledge of the postwar industrialization movement in Georgia and the South.
Chris Meyers is Professor of History at Valdosta State University. His books include The Empire State of the South and Georgia: A Brief History, (with David Williams).