Chapter 1
Rolling Stores
Few strangers crossed the hardscrabble landscape that Harry Crews evoked in his memoir of childhood in south Georgia during the 1930s and 1940s. Crews remembered that the Jewish peddler, driving a team of mismatched mules, "came into [his] little closed world smelling of strangeness and far places." Bolts of cloth, needles, thimbles, spools of thread, forks, knives and spoons, and a grinding stone that "could sharpen anything," staples, nails, mule harnesses, "and a thousand other things" filled the inside of the peddler's wagon. Frying pans, boiling pots, washtubs, and mason fruit jars festooned the outside.[1]
It was Harry's mother, Myrtice Crews, who negotiated for these treasures. The peddler "did business almost exclusively with women," Crews recollected, "and whatever they needed, they could always find in the Jew's wagon. If they didn't have the money to pay for what they needed, he would trade for eggs or chickens or cured meat or canned vegetables and berries." To arrive at a price, the peddler and Crews's mother performed a ritual of bargaining. No matter how much Myrtice Crews protested "I ain't got the money," she often succumbed to the peddler's invitation to feel a bolt of cloth; and, after more haggling, he might offer to take corn and hay to feed his mules in payment for the fabric. Harry's mother signaled the end of the transactions when she "silently took two brown chicken eggs out of her apron and gave them to him" in exchange for peppermint balls. "With the candies melting on our tongues," Crews wrote, "we stood and watched him go, feeling as though we had ourselves just been on a long trip, a trip to the world we knew was out there but had never seen," a trip financed with the products of his mother's labor.[2]
Modest negotiations like those conducted by Myrtice Crews in her backyard occurred routinely during the first half of the twentieth century. Ubiquitous but elusive, transactions with itinerant merchants have been overlooked by scholars who assume that country stores took center stage in the rural New South. Analyzing stories about itinerant commerce rather than treating them as quaint anecdotes enriches the understanding of the New South's consumer economy and broadens the cast of characters who shaped it. Recent studies demonstrate that southern country stores were economic institutions and social spaces where white men held the upper hand.[3] Oral history interviews, reminiscences, regional fiction, and trade literature illuminate a universe of buying and selling where itinerant merchants prevailed, where the farm household was a place of consumption as well as production, and where male dominance and white supremacy might be challenged.
A consideration of itinerant commerce joins a lively historical literature that charts the complex story of how consumer culture spread across the United States. Once preoccupied with middle-class shoppers in the urban Northeast, scholars have discovered that the story's subplots vary by region, race, gender, and class, revolve around the agency of buyers as well as the power of businesses, and unfold at different times in different places. This look at itinerant commerce focuses less on cultural historians' questions about theories of consumerism and the meanings of goods than on the concerns of social historiansthe nature of buying and selling, the power relationships that defined those transactions, and the context in which they occurred. It highlights human relationships rather then anonymous representatives of the market.[4]
Several kinds of mobile merchants operated in the rural South well into the twentieth century. Some, like the Jewish peddler of Harry Crews's youth, were independent entrepreneurs who sold from their packs or wagons. Other itinerants operated what were popularly known as "rolling stores," portable extensions of permanent businesses. Still other "traveling men" represented large manufacturing firms that offered a diverse line of goods and provided elaborate advice on sales techniques. Two firms whose retailers frequented rural southern homes were the W. T. Rawleigh Company and the J. R. Watkins Medical Company, both headquartered in the upper Midwest but boasting factories and distribution centers all over the United States, with several strategically located to take advantage of southern markets.[5]
Itinerant merchants extended the world of manufactured goods into the countryside. Although they certainly did business with any willing customer, they appealed to women and African American buyers who entertained fewer options as consumers than did white men. Itinerant sellers accommodated the needs of black and white farm women, whose patronage of town and country stores was often limited by constraints on their travel and by their discomfort in commercial places where men gathered to do business and visit. Because itinerant merchants took the products of women's labor in trade, women customers could combine domestic production with consumption in a mix that suited their needs and pocketbooks. Contrary to the assumptions of cultural historians that sellers always had the upper hand, these customers were shrewd buyers rather than easy dupes, and they enjoyed the challenge of bargaining with traders. Besides the goods that filled a peddler's pack or a sales agent's sample case, itinerant merchants arrived with news from beyond the immediate neighborhood, a commodity prized by women who kept close to home. Furthermore, African American men found doing business with mobile merchants attractive because what and where itinerants sold provided alternatives to trading with southern country storekeepers whose racist assumptions shaped access to credit and goods.
Itinerant merchants in the New South joined a long line of mobile sellers that began with peddlers. American business practice and lore usually associate peddlers with antebellum Yankee entrepreneurs who sold clocks, tin ware, patent medicines, cloth, and notions to country people. In the early nineteenth century, peddlers served an economic purpose as distributors for small-scale manufacturers and importers. But as historian Jackson Lears has argued, they also were the heralds of a nascent consumer culture and touchstones for the anxiety and ambivalence that the spread of a market economy generated. Here today and gone tomorrow, itinerants crossed the boundaries between local neighborhoods and the cosmopolitan world; they represented the "magic" of the marketplace, with its mixture of danger and allure. Peddlers inspired a rich folklore and humor that mirrored the apprehensions that accompanied the quickened pace of nineteenth-century commerce. In literary representations and the popular imagination, peddlers aroused suspicion as outsiders and clever tricksters who supposedly found women, in particular, to be vulnerable to their verbally seductive sales pitches.[6]
As peddlers extended the market's reach into the antebellum South, anxieties about both race and gender aroused suspicions. Newspaper editors and storekeepers accused peddlers of "cheating women and children."[7] At least one husband agreed. In 1826, a Georgia man accused peddlers of convincing his young bride "to buy a considerable quantity of store-goods" without his "knowledge or approbation" and was so incensed that he took out a newspaper advertisement warning vendors away from his house for eighteen months.[8] Peddlers also stirred distrust among slaveholders. Planters feared that itinerants trafficked with slaves who offered pilfered livestock in trade and worried that peddlers were abolitionists in disguise sowing the seeds of rebellion among bondmen. In the wake of insurrection panics, slaveholders cast skeptical eyes on itinerant merchants who were strangers in their midst. After John Brown's 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry, for example, whites in several Georgia towns questioned and harassed traveling salesmen from the North, who were thought to sympathize with the abolitionist. An idle remark was enough to provoke a committee of white citizens in Columbus, Georgia, to scrutinize the "many persons from the free States now traveling through our neighborhood for the ostensible purpose of selling books, maps, rat traps, etc.," and such harassment inspired the salesmen to catch the next train or steamship home.[9]
What those who study peddlers have ignoredbut is implicit in their accountsis that the harshest critics of itinerants were white men who constructed unsavory images of peddlers and their female and African American clientele in an effort to control access to the marketplace. Centering the analysis of consumption around gender and consumers' perspectives, however, places peddlers in a different light. Perhaps peddlers posed a danger because they took their wares to buyers who were not male heads of households. By extending the market, peddlers and their patrons undercut the domestic authority of men. From the vantage point of women and slaves, peddlers were welcomed visitors. The same was true for their postbellum descendants.[10]
Although the popular literature of the New South perpetuated images of peddlers as duplicitous tricksters, these portrayals camouflage the precarious social conditions of their work. After the Civil War, recent newcomers from Eastern Europe got a foothold in business by peddling in the South. With little capital to invest, immigrant peddlers often catered to poor whites and African Americans, economically marginal figures like themselves. Stereotyped as shady dealers, peddlers were in reality vulnerable salesmen who were easy targets of criminals as they traveled alone hauling merchandise and carrying money. Such was the fate of Francis Brice, an Irish peddler who sold his wares in southeastern North Carolina. In 1878 as Brice passed through a remote marsh, two local men shot him, wrenched a pistol from his hand, and clubbed him with his own walking stick. After stealing Brice's money, the robbers left him to die. Similar bad fortune befell Samuel Tucker, a Jewish peddler from Richmond, Virginia, whose route traversed the North Carolina piedmont. During an 1892 selling trip, Tucker sought overnight lodgings in Franklin County and was robbed and murdered where he rested. The culprits tossed his body into a vine-choked ravine, where it went undetected for months.[11] As these cases suggest, representing peddlers as tricksters endowed them with more social power than they actually wielded.
Popular mythology also distorts other characteristics of peddlers' work. Like the itinerant whom Harry Crews remembered, many peddlers became familiar outsiders rather than feared strangers. Though customers surely did not count them as neighbors and frequently associated immigrants with exotic, foreign places, between spring and fall of each year peddlers often traveled predictable circuits that brought them back to the same customers month after month. For example, in the early twentieth century a man known only as "Peddler Black" was a regular visitor in Owen County, Kentucky. While residents later debated his ethnicity and pondered his "mysterious origins," at least one woman asserted that "he was not a stranger to us."[12]
Although general stores had sprouted at nearly every dusty crossroad by the 1880s and 1890s, itinerant merchants continued to find a niche in the New South. Even as railroads connected the region to national markets and the region crawled with drummers who sold wholesale to storekeepers, access to the manufactured goods that expanded briskly after the Civil War varied according to place, race, class, and gender. Members of the new middle class who lived in the South's burgeoning towns and cities could patronize stores and specialty shops that their country cousins could only imagine. Country stores offered lines of merchandise that ranged from patent medicines to plow points, but peddlers and other sales agents brought their wares right to the homes of customers for whom the rural retail outlets were alien places.[13]
General stores, as historian Ted Ownby has noted, "were not settings for racial equality." Nor were they settings for gender equality. Black and white men struck bargains with merchants who provided credit for farm supplies, groceries, and dry goods in exchange for liens on their crops. White men gathered around stoves to play checkers or loafed on porches, passing the time with ribald humor and neighborhood gossip, the conversations sometimes lubricated with whiskey. Although white storekeepers welcomed African American men as customers, they kept a tight fist on credit, monitored their purchases, directed them toward inferior goods, and did little to ease the tensions that black men felt as "conspicuous outsiders." In the era of Jim Crow, the stores became stages where southerners choreographed steps in a new dance of race relations. Sometimes black and white men mixed freely and without conflict, but all too often African Americans suffered verbal epithets or physical jostling that diminished any joy attached to buying.[14]
Bastions of male customs and habits, country stores were not particularly hospitable places for women to shop, either. In his classic study of southern country stores, Thomas D. Clark noted that women approached these centers of commerce with reluctance and uneasiness. "They stood near the front door with embarrassed grins on their faces showing clearly mixed feelings of eager curiosity and shocked modesty," Clark wrote. "They were caught in the unhappy situation of not knowing whether to stay until someone came to serve them or to leave the store." In the 1930s and 1940s when photographers from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) traveled the back roads of the South, they found men lounging on store porches and gathered inside; women were hardly to be found. The woman who did venture across a store's threshold might, in William Faulkner's words, have to pass "the squatting men . . . spitting across the heelgnawed porch" and training their "ranked battery of maneyes" on her.[15]
Practical constraints joined ideology to restrict rural women's visits to stores. Preoccupied with bearing and rearing children much of their adult lives, rural women simply had less chance to get away from home. Basic household maintenance filled their time. When Sara Brooks was growing up in the Alabama Black Belt during the 1920s, her mother rarely accompanied her father to town on Saturdays. Brooks's mother reserved the day for cleaning the house, sweeping the yard, and cooking Sunday dinner.[16]
Although the products of women's labor often provided the currency for trade, men usually did the shopping. Sara Brooks reported that before her father went to the store, he asked his wife, "'Now what to get?' [and] [s]he would write him a little list and give it to him." In eastern North Carolina, A. C. and Grace Griffin established a similar pattern in the 1930s and maintained it for years. "When we first got married we didn't have any transportation the first five years," Grace Griffin explained. "On Saturday morning [A. C.] and his daddy would go to town in the mule and cart and buy the week's groceries. Then we had a young couple . . . move close to us. . . . He and A. C. would go to town together on Saturday morning a lot of times and each one would carry whatever eggs we had left over from the hens that week and buy the groceries. Well, the pattern was set by the time we got an automobile and I learned how to drive it."[17]
The shopping arrangement that the Griffins worked out also followed from expectations about proper public behavior, which differed for men and women. When women went to town to buy groceries, Grace Griffin had been raised to believe, they should dress up, whereas men were free to wear their work clothes away from home. If A. C. did the shopping, she was spared the trouble of outfitting herself for a "public" appearance.[18]
Itinerant merchants understood these facts of economic and social life and turned farm households into sites of consumption as well as production. In reminiscences of rural life in the early-twentieth-century South, peddlers remained familiar figures. Filtered through the lens of childhood, recollections ascribed magical qualities to peddlers who inspired fascination and fantasy. The peddler's visit to the Wake County farm where Bernice Kelly Harris grew up in the late nineteenth century remained a vivid memory for the North Carolina writer forty years later. When the peddler opened his packs, Harris recalled, "It was Aladdin's lamp, an adventure in wonderland, a glimpse into the gold-haired prince's palace beside the sea. For the rings and things conjured up a way of life that glittered." The peddler, according to Harris, "was not so much a person to the children as a symbol, like Santa Claus."[19] Harris was not alone in her fond memories. Itinerant sellers "who visited the farms of those days and brightened the lives of those who lived there" figured prominently in Caroline S. Coleman's reminiscences about a turn-of-the-century childhood in the South Carolina piedmont. The peddlers who "linked the remote countryside with the marts of trade" in her part of the world were usually Italians, Syrians, or Irishmen. Children playing in the yard often spied the peddlers first and relayed the exciting news to their grandmother. As the peddler unfastened his pack, Coleman remembered, "we watched in wide eyed wonder" as he revealed the "riches of Araby."[20]
For children like Harris and Coleman, peddlers represented miraculous gift bearers. But for adult women their visits provided opportunities to bargain for household necessities and a few small luxuries and to embroider their roles as good domestic managers. While young Bernice Kelly enjoyed the aroma of soaps and admired the ribbons, lace, and brooches that the peddler displayed, her mother calculated which goods she could afford to buy and which trinkets she had to pass up. After engaging in a form of window-shopping in her own home, Bernice appreciated that her mother "had spent her butter and egg money to let us enjoy looking at the wares." When the peddler arrived at the home of Caroline Coleman's grandmother, the older woman invited him to turn her parlor into a show room for the fine shawls, towels, tablecloths, pillow shams, combs, and beads that he pulled from his pack. Word of the peddler's visit traveled the "grapevine telegraph," and soon "every colored woman on the place" came to examine his stock and to join the "fine art" of trading with him. Buying turned into a collective activity, and having several women match bargaining wits with a peddler might have afforded them some advantage. After the dickering had ended, Coleman's grandmother offered to board the peddler for the night, her gesture of hospitality repaid with stories "of his home country in the great world beyond our doors" and with a gift such as fine linen towels.[21]
Hassan Mohamed was a Lebanese peddler who gained a foothold in southern commerce. Soon after he landed in New York City in 1911, Mohamed headed to the Mississippi Delta, where friends helped him get a start. A Clarksdale, Mississippi, storekeeper "gave him $27 worth of merchandise in [a] little suitcase," and Mohamed set out on foot to sell. A limited command of English and an unfamiliarity with American currency put Mohamed at the mercy of his customersa dilemma that turned the image of the crafty peddler on its head. "He said he didn't know the five dollars from the ten [dollar bill] or the one," recalled his widow, Ethel Wright Mohamed. "But he said he felt like any house he stopped, they'd buy whatever they bought out of the suitcase, they would make the change and he felt like everyone was honest. He didn't think anybody beat him out of any money."[22]
Black sharecroppers who worked Delta plantations patronized Mohamed, and he counted one woman in particular as a "special" customer. If she and her family were working in the fields when he arrived, Mohamed napped in the shade until she came to the house. "Then he would go up on the porch," Ethel Wright Mohamed explained, "and she would have some of the neighbors come, and they'd buy everything out of his suitcase right there. And he said she would run her hand up under the rug and get the money she had hid in the house. And he thought that was the most wonderful thing he'd ever seen. And so that was her bank . . . and that was his store." Within three years, Mohamed had earned enough to buy a wagon, allowing him to expand the line of goods he carried and the territory he covered. By 1922 he could afford to buy a store in the hamlet of Shaw and to settle permanently.[23]
Trading with peddlers was especially appealing to women. They could weigh their choices in the privacy of their back yards or front porches. They shaped the space where goods were displayed, calibrated their value, and gauged their own capacity to spend. They might even practice their bartering prowess before an appreciative audience of neighbors. On home turf, women incorporated commerce into a domestic economy where they operated from a position of strength and helped define the terms of trade.
The peddlers' lessons were not lost on storeowners. Some rural storekeepers realized that they could tap their market's full potential only if they took their merchandise to women's homes. At these "rolling stores"trucks or wagons fitted out with merchandisecustomers could buy according to their financial means or personal whims. Hal Edmonds's grandfather knew that the farm wives and daughters in the North Carolina mountains made infrequent trips to the country store or to the Madison County towns of Mars Hill and Marshall. But every week O. S. Edmonds took a scaled-down version of his permanent store to customers, trading merchandise for eggs, chickens, and butter. In the 1940s, Hal worked as a clerk for his grandfather. "Most all that traded in the regular store," Hal Edmonds explained, "they was mostly men. Men would come to the store and stay about all day and their wives, whatever they wanted, they would write it down or tell the men. Women very seldom ever come to the store. Like in the rolling [store] business, it was all different. It was all women."[24]
Because Edmonds followed regular weekly routes, women anticipated his arrival and met him at the end of their lanes, ready to offer baskets of eggs or coops of live chickens in trade. "They'd like to come out right beside the house," Edmonds recalled, "sit down beside the road. See, you started up a little road up one of these hollers, and they could hear you coming. Wasn't no traffic." From the shelves and aisle of the specially rigged truck, Edmonds supplied primarily the same merchandise that stocked the shelves of his "regular store." He also took special orders for bulky items, such as a hundred-pound bag of salt during hog-killing season, or custom goods, such as shoes, which he delivered the following week. The rolling store business continued in Madison County until the 1950s, when better roads and more automobiles eased travel and chain grocery stores were established.[25]
Rolling stores also served rural customers in south Georgia, where Mioma Thompson grew up the daughter of farm wage hands during the 1930s. Her mother patronized stores in the town of Tifton and the rolling stores that stopped at their house. Rolling stores, Thompson remembered, "carried material, flour and sugar, flavoring, or this liniment. A lot of people back then was bad to rub with liniment. Just whatever they could put on that store that would keep, that's what they'd take." By the time the mobile store arrived, "Mama would always save her money and her eggs. Course, we had what we wanted to eat. But about time for [the rolling store] to come, she'd go to saving them eggs up and put her a chicken in the coop, fatten it up. That's the way she got what she needed." Mioma's mother controlled the egg money and used its proceeds to buy staple goods and to indulge a child's sweet tooth when the mobile merchant visited.[26]
Buying at the "rolling store" allowed customers to acquire needed goods and to enjoy a form of entertainment. In East Tennessee until the mid-1940s, Della Sarten traded butter and eggs with a man who ran a rolling store "that was just packed full." A man from Sevierville "come along with cloth, had anything like they had in a grocery store," Sarten recalled. "He come around once a week. I had eggs. Sometimes I'd sell two or three hens. Then I'd have a list wrote out, and I'd just call it off, and they'd just hand it out, and on they'd go." To the merchant's dismay, not everyone made their choices as quickly as Sarten did, and he recounted to Sarten his experiences with other customers: "My next door neighbor, she'd climb up in their truck, and she'd look at the cloth and she looked at everything for about an hour. He said one day, 'If everybody was like you, we'd get along.' They'd come back in Sevierville way in the night, you know, people taking so long to trade."[27] In contrast to the pragmatic Sarten, her neighbor turned the storekeeper's visit into a leisure activity. Either way, the seller had to keep the customer happy.
A third kind of itinerant merchant was a common visitor to rural southern homesagents who represented large manufacturing enterprises and specialized in a line of goods. Salesmen of musical instruments, lightening rods, and patent medicines pervaded the autobiographical novels and folk plays of North Carolinian Bernice Kelly Harris. When a stranger appeared in the fictional community of Beulah Ridge, for example, the women speculated that he must be selling farm periodicals or Canadian lace. Like peddlers, these "traveling men" often doubled as entertainers; their skills as raconteurs and musicians complemented their sales pitches, and customers prized their talents, company, and the news they brought with them as much as they prized the merchandise they sold. In Harris's play Pair of Quilts, Sudie Johnson rated the traveling men who boarded in her home. "I thought the 'Native Herb' man was real entertainin' with his fast pieces on the fiddle, and the lightnin' rod agent with han'chief tricks," Sudie said, "but the grapherphone man's got 'em all beat with his funny jokes."[28]
Like the members of her own family, the women of Harris's fiction welcomed sales agents, but the men often tried to ban them or banished them outright. One woman of the neighborhood reported that the squire of Beulah Ridge "stopped agents from comin' on his land, told 'em to stay away from the Ridge just like he owned it all." In Harris's novel Purslane, the patriarch John Fuller so despised solicitors that he "had once put up a sign at the road: 'No agents allowed here.'" The warning had backfired, however, attracting rather than deterring curious salesmen. The "Native Herb" man was among those who ignored the posting and annoyed John Fuller by interrupting his plowing with his sales pitch. But when the agent "mentioned indigestion," John's wife Dele "entered the conversation," Harris wrote. "The result was she took the agency for the herb pills," which "became a family and neighborhood standby" for all manner of ailments and also turned a profit for Dele. How frequently women sold medicines is uncertain. In Mothers of the South: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman, sociologist Margaret Jarman Hagood described the pitch of a woman selling salves, tooth powders, and a tonic called Vi-Ava.[29]
These fictional sales agents were in some ways prototypes of the men who sold the products of the Rawleigh and Watkins companies. To this day older rural southerners recollect regular visits by "the Rawleigh man" and "the Watkins man." Although they often put these sellers in the same category as peddlers and rolling-store merchants, salesmen for Rawleigh and Watkins were, in many respects, a breed apart. When they arrived at farmhouses with their sample cases, they were retailers acting on behalf of large companies whose founders had coached them in the latest sales techniques. These itinerant merchants represented a new, intensified phase in the creation of a national market for brand-name consumer goods. But gender, race, and local customs shaped the way southerners encountered the market.[30]
Although Rawleigh and Watkins retailers visited rural southern homes frequently, the parent companies were located in the upper Midwest. Based in northern Illinois, the W. T. Rawleigh Company headquarters was less than two hundred miles from the J. R. Watkins Medical Company hometown of Winona, Minnesota. W. T. Rawleigh began modestly in the late nineteenth century, peddling to farmers the medicines that his first wifewhom he later divorcedmanufactured and bottled in their home near Freeport. By the early twentieth century, Rawleigh envisioned the sales potential and the company began building factories in cities across the United States and Canada. The birth and development of the J. R. Watkins Medical Company followed a similar path, starting with a popular liniment in 1868 and expanding its inventory and sales territory in the early twentieth century.[31]
A dizzying array of products rolled off the Rawleigh and Watkins assembly lines. There were spices and flavorings to season foods, toiletries to soften and perfume the body, salves, liniments, laxatives, and cough syrups to relieve human aches and afflictions, and veterinary dips, disinfectants, and powders to treat the diseases of livestock. In 1921 the Rawleigh Company manufactured 125 different products; during a visit by "the Rawleigh man" customers could buy everything from blood-purifying tonics to vanilla flavoring and lemon extract, cinnamon and nutmeg, White Rose and Anna May Bouquet perfumes, shampoo and face lotion, and a powder to rid chickens of lice.[32]
By 1912 both companies had established factories and branches in Memphis, Tennessee. Rawleigh boasted that its "beautiful and artistic" manufacturing plant there, surrounded by "a spreading lawn," was "the handsomest factory building in the South, being pronounced perfect by the State Factory Inspection." While the Memphis plant positioned the company to tap markets in the mid-South, a Richmond factory put the company within easy reach of retailers and customers in the upper South. Similarly, the Watkins company declared that its Memphis and Baltimore branches had "helped greatly in developing an enormous business in the southern states long before any other concerns operating by the wagon method had even made a start" and had "made the south solid for Watkins." Yet, the company announced it could still employ hundreds of salesmen because there was "a lot of virgin territory in the South awaiting the coming of 'The Watkins way.'"[33]
Both companies published manuals, designed to entice men to join their sales teams and to instruct them in the most effective selling techniques. In 1906 W. T. Rawleigh wrote his first selling guide, and another followed in 1921, its 319 pages full of tips guaranteed to increase sales. Rawleigh's suggestions were exhaustive, and he anticipated every contingency. By 1926, the Rawleigh Methods guide filled 1,917 pages, and in bulk it resembled a thick brick. Meanwhile, Watkins published a similaralbeit slimmersales manual entitled The Open Door to Success about 1914.[34]
Like manufacturers of their era who "literally celebrated the 'mass' in mass production," Rawleigh and Watkins impressed employees and customers with the vastness of their companies. The Rawleigh enterprise, for example, began with expeditions to Madagascar, Sumatra, and other foreign lands in search of the most pungent spices, and then the company produced an extensive line of goods in large factories and coordinated complicated distribution systems that ran like well-oiled machines. The process ended when Rawleigh retailers established successful routes that delivered products to customers. Sketches of the Rawleigh and Watkins factories illustrated their publications, visually reinforcing the scale and scope of the operations and encouraging sales agents to consider themselves part of modern American businesses based on mass production and factory-made goods.[35]
Rawleigh and Watkins sought to distance themselves from unflattering images of itinerant merchants by stressing that their agents represented the vanguard of modern marketing methods. "Our men are not mere peddlers," insisted the Watkins company. "They are high class salesmen with a real service to render the public." Rawleigh assured customers that the retailer of his products was "No stranger, or irresponsible, transient agent, or peddler to take your money and be gone," but "a neighbor and a friend. . . . He is not an outsider."[36]
Rawleigh coached his retailers in the principles of "scientific salesmanship," encouraging sellers to follow precise rules rather than relying on techniques and patter that they invented themselves. A good agent, according to the 1921 guide, "must be more than a mere order-takerhe must be a creator and builder of business, he must be able to influence and persuade others to buy his goods, he must create interest, then desire, and afterwards decision or action." With practice and experience, Rawleigh assured new agents, "you will be able to read character," design an effective presentation, and judge "your chances of making sales . . . almost instantly after you have met your customer."[37]
Rawleigh and Watkins manuals featured the stories of outstanding agents. Not surprisingly, their experiences endorsed company sales recommendations. Both firms encouraged retailers to make as many "Time and Trial" sales as possible. Customers who accepted goods on trial agreed to pay in full on the agent's next visit only if they had used the products and found them satisfactory. Agents shared tips on ways to dissolve customer resistance to buying and to collect money owed for products sold on credit. Indeed, testimonials usually took the form of long dialogues between the agent and his customers that read like scripts for novice sellers to follow. Although agents were encouraged to seek food and lodging with families along their routes, they were discouraged from indulging in evening entertainments; swapping stories or playing music was not part of the "modern" salesman's repertoire. Rather, the agent in these exemplary stories spent his time demonstrating products or preparing customers for sales that he would conclude before his departure in the morning.[38]
The Rawleigh company counted both men and women among its customers, but testimonials by agents suggest that husbands were more skeptical of itinerants than were their wives. Men, according to these accounts, might refuse to buy from peddlers or "wagon men" because they preferred to patronize established storekeepers in their communities or suspected the quality of the products sold by itinerants. On the other hand, the trade literature portrayed women as customers who recognized the superiority of the Rawleigh spices, flavorings, and medicines.[39]
When a "Rawleigh man" or "Watkins man" pulled up to a southern farmhouse, he had a bag of sales tricks at his disposalif he heeded the voluminous advice offered. The recollections of a Chatham County, North Carolina, woman whose grandparents bought from "the Rawleigh man" during the 1930s and 1940s suggest that agents followed some of the recommendations. Gladys Hackney Thomas recalled that the Rawleigh retailer who called on her family patiently described his products but did not dawdle. "He was always in a hurry," she remembered. "He took time to show his goods," but as soon as purchases were made, "he was on his way." The behavior of this "Rawleigh man" resembles the sales guide's directive to "be active and business-like" when making customer calls. "Do not loaf or loiter around one moment after finishing your business," the guide instructed. "Time is valuable, do not waste yours or compel others to waste theirs, but move on." In addition, the North Carolina agent met the Rawleigh dress code of "neat but not showy," a style with which rural customers would feel comfortable. "He didn't wear overalls like farmers did," Thomas remembered, "but he didn't wear a tie, either."[40]
Oral-history accounts suggest that women especially welcomed the visits of Rawleigh and Watkins retailers because they provided breaks in household routines and opportunities to make autonomous purchases. Moreover, contrary to stereotype, women appear to have been discriminating customers who judged products and evaluated their efficacy with care. The "Rawleigh man" passed through Gladys Thomas's community about once every three months, and the women "were so thrilled" that they telephoned neighbors as soon as someone spotted him in the vicinity. He often arrived mid-morning, and Thomas's grandmother and aunts would interrupt their cooking to inspect the goods and make their purchases. The women treasured the Rawleigh salves and liniments that lined the family medicine chest, and Thomas's grandmother liked to add Rawleigh cake colorings to batter or frosting, a touch that set her cakes apart from the crowd on Sundays when a church dinner followed preaching.[41]
The Watkins agent who visited the eastern North Carolina home of Edythe Hollowell Jones in the 1920s became a source of amusement, but his products were highly valued. The family joked that the salesman planned his route in order to arrive at noon. "I've heard my mother say when he was in our neighborhood, she swore he heard our dinner bell ring and made it there in time to eat dinner," recalled Edythe Jones. "Oh, yeah! Mama'd always ask him to come in and have dinner and he'd eat." Irene Barber Hollowell selected "all kinds of spices," trusted Rawleigh salves to relieve congested chests and soothe burns, and "swore by" the veterinary tablets and powders she bought to cure her chickens of parasites. Examining the Rawleigh products brought to her door gave Irene Hollowell "an opportunity to make a few purchasing decisions" otherwise denied her when her husband filled the grocery list.[42]
Rural southerners used consumer goods to their own ends, incorporating purchased medicines into a pharmacopoeia that still included homemade remedies. New consumer possibilities did not eclipse older practices. Although Gladys Thomas's grandmother bought Rawleigh tonics and salves, she continued to gather wild mullein leaves and cherry tree bark to be boiled into a syrup for coughs. The fictional Dele Fuller purchased indigestion pills from the "Native Herb" man, but she and her female relatives searched the woods when they needed ingredients for a special salve that relieved aching muscles and joints or a tea that soothed sore throats. Even store-bought medicines were applied in dosages and according to methods that reflected the accumulated wisdom of farm women. Rather than being susceptible to bogus sales pitches, many farm women evaluated the curative powers of commercial remedies and made choices based on time-tested observations and experiences.[43]
Although Rawleigh advised salesmen to accept payment in goods instead of cash only as a last resort, agents nonetheless found themselves bartering with customers for whom eggs, chickens, or smoked meats were the only currency. In south Georgia, Clyde Purvis's mother swapped eggs for Rawleigh products. During the depression, Jessie Gosney's father ran a Rawleigh route near Stuttgart, Arkansas. Using hyperbole to describe the lengths to which her father went to cater to his poor clients, Gosney said that he "would get paid in dogs and cats and strawberries, rotten strawberries. Mother never will forgive him for that." Barter and mass marketing went hand in hand.[44]
Photographs suggest the popularity of Watkins products in the South and illustrate how farm families used company advertising as a kind of vernacular household decoration. In 1938, FSA photographer Russell Lee recorded a husband, wife, and six children in "a small, plainly furnished, but comfortable house" near New Iberia, Louisiana. The only adornment on the wall behind them was a Watkins calendar. When FSA photographer Jack Delano captured the image of "Mrs. Fanny Parrot, the wife of an ex-slave" near Siloam, Georgia, in May 1941, the subject posed before a fireplace. Above the mantel hung a Watkins calendar, and suspended below it was a Watkins almanac.[45]
As black southerners entered the market as consumers, albeit on unequal terms with whites, the Rawleigh company took note. During a trip to his Memphis plant in the 1920s, W. T. Rawleigh became convinced that southern African Americans represented a lucrative market for the company's line of goods. When he published the 1926 edition of his sales guide, he entitled a chapter "Southern Collection Methods." Drawn largely from retailer testimonials, the chapter encouraged Rawleigh men to overcome reservations they might have about dealing with black customers and described the best ways to sell to and collect from them.[46]
The advice reflected a contradictory blend of entrepreneurial respect and racist suspicion and coercion typical of white southern country storeowners. "[T]reat the negro right," began the circuitous counsel of J. W. McCall of Tennessee. "Of course keep them in their place. Sell them the Products and let them know you expect their money and treat them as negroes should be treated. Treat them with the same consideration in a business transaction as white people." Although the sales manual cautioned southern Rawleigh retailers "against using old fashioned plantation managers' methods of extending credits and allowing Consumers to . . . pay only once a year" after fall harvest, agents who had profited from a large trade with black customers described taking out mortgages and notes as one way to ensure reimbursement for products sold on time. On some plantations, Rawleigh men consulted with managers and owners before selling to tenants and convinced them to agree "that the accounts . . . would be guaranteed by the manager and held out of [the tenant's] crop or wages."[47]
Rawleigh men who shared their methods of collecting payments revealed that they subjected black customers to bullying tactics never imagined for white buyers. A Georgia agent who tried to win the confidence of black clients and to treat them fairly nonetheless resorted to threats of suing "careless" blacks who failed to pay their bills. An Alabama salesman treated his recalcitrant patrons "firmly" and provided an example of a firm collection strategy. "One day," he recalled, "I had to get out of my wagon and whip one fellow to make him see my way, but from then on, I never had any trouble." To encourage retailers to tap the African American market, Rawleigh first contended that many black customers were as trustworthy as whites and then sanctioned legal and physical coercion should there be exceptions to this general principle.[48]
Rawleigh's philosophy toward black customers compounded the disadvantages that African Americans suffered in a marketplace where landlords and merchants commonly practiced usury and deceit. Yet Rawleigh did provide African Americans buying options that included the range of goods they could purchase and the site of consumption itself. While some retailers sought the consent and cooperation of plantation managers before approaching tenants, others met black buyers in places that blacks controlled and that were away from the watchful eyes of whites. S. B. Pearson of Alabama, for example, delivered products to and collected payments from black customers at a local church or schoolhouse.[49]
Regardless of the conditions of trade, African Americans may have welcomed the alternative to general stores that Rawleigh men and other sales agents offered. Merchants who "furnished" credit and supplies to farm families often scrutinized their purchases in order to limit the amount of debt accumulated through the year. For example, the southern Mississippi storekeeper who "furnished" N. J. Booth in the 1930s and 1940s restricted the purchases that the black farmer and his wife could make, although they owned their own land. The merchant, Booth recalled, refused to sell his wife groceries that "he figured we could do without. She might [make a list that included] something to make a cake or something like that. He took that off. Flour and lard, he would leave that on. But something extra, he always looked at the bill and he took that off." The merchant "had to okay the bill every time my wife or Brother Henry's wife [wanted to buy anything]and he did the poor white the same way." Wayland Spivey, an African American sharecropper in eastern North Carolina in the 1940s, described a similar experience. The landlord "would give me a purchase order to go to the store and get food, and that was all I could get."[50] Given such restrictions, black farmers might welcome a "Rawleigh man" and a chance to buy flavorings and spices to beat into cake batter.
Not all itinerants undermined racial hierarchies, but peddlers, rolling-store owners, and agents of national companies at least provided white women and African Americans with options that were denied to them at country stores. Stores flourished and fostered a new consumer economy and culture in the South's cities and towns; at the same time, an older way of buying and selling persisted and assumed new forms as itinerants "linked the remote countryside with the marts of trade." Too often, historians of commerce in the New South have treated stories about mobile merchants and their customers as picturesque artifacts of an earlier era. But taken seriously, these stories reveal that humble consumers shaped the marketplace and enticed sellers to offer goods on their turf and on their terms. Careful observations of transactions conducted with itinerant merchants add new layers of meaning to the picture of consumerism in the rural South and demonstrate that women and African Americans were agents in the marketplace who stretched its boundaries rather than buckled to its constraints. As Myrtice Crews and her boy Harry knew every time the Jewish peddler drove into their yard, the southern country store was but one constellation in the region's universe of buying and selling.