On 21 February 1893, Joseph E. Geigan of Baltimore, Maryland, a bicycle dealer and amateur racing cyclist, patented the name “New South” for his own line of bicycles modelled on the English-designed Humber. Geigan hoped to cash in on the “name made famous by Henry W. Grady, of Atlanta.” The year before, Geigan, along with seven other white men, had incorporated Baltimore's ’Cycle and Athletic Association with the purpose of developing real estate along with maintaining and improving land for cycling and other athletic pursuits. The bicycle allowed these men to easily leave the city for the countryside and in doing so connected them to new landscapes for financial development. Geigan's New South bicycle venture, however, was short-lived. By May his business had gone under. Joseph Geigan was one of many New South white men who saw the bicycle as a symbol of their personal wealth and the region's industrial future based on a new high-tech consumer good. But as the fate of his business indicated, the future of the New South and its bicycles was often far from certain.Footnote 1
The introduction of the modern safety bicycle to the United States’ South in 1887 is an opportunity to assess the southern experience of a global mass culture, the modern subjectivities and self-fashioning it contributed to, and the knowledge of both the local region and the wider world it helped facilitate. The subjectivity of riding a bicycle transformed the ways in which white southerners experienced, thought of, and imagined their region. The bicycle and cycling were part of a culture that developed rapidly around the world between 1885 and 1892 before peaking in the United States in 1897 and ebbing and flowing thereafter.Footnote 2 Studying white southerners’ embrace of the bicycle reveals the ways in which the everyday experiences of local culture in the early New South (1877–1917) intersected with global developments. Southern cycling enthusiasts in the 1890s were as likely to follow what was happening in Paris and London as they were Atlanta or New York.Footnote 3
Black southerners also took up cycling in this period. The bicycle – initially an expensive object associated with recreation and leisure – was a status symbol for an aspiring class of African Americans who embraced the “politics of respectability.” Black cyclists, however, were largely confined to the region's growing towns and cities. Given the racial dynamics of the first boom period, it would have been a dangerous calculation for black cyclists to ride their bicycles beyond city limits to explore the countryside. This is not to say that black southerners did not cycle. Indeed, a diverse and dynamic black cycling culture emerged in the South and a number of professional black racing cyclists could be found on velodromes in New York, Chicago, and Paris. However, for black southerners, the bicycle, while important to their own self-fashioning as a modern people in the era of Jim Crow, did not necessarily connect to the construction of a regional imagination and subjectivity.Footnote 4
Around the world at the end of the nineteenth century, the bicycle and modernity went hand in hand. It had a profound effect on the experience of movement and introduced a new subjectivity based on technologically facilitated personal mobility. At the moment when old social orders were collapsing in the face of industrialization and urbanization, the bicycle became one of the most prominent symbols of personal freedom. By the middle of the 1890s in North America and Europe, the bicycle had gone from an upper-class and mostly masculine hobby to a transportation and leisure object embraced by an expanding middle class of men and women. Many Americans believed that the bicycle would lead to a radical transformation of the nation and its social order. But by the start of the twentieth century the cycling bubble had popped. The bicycle, however, while no longer representing the cutting edge of industrial technology, remained widely used.Footnote 5
The bicycle's integration of human and machine also made it dissimilar to other contemporary vehicles. Riding a bicycle was and is an act of bodily performance. In a society like the New South that outwardly valued tradition while seeking to industrialize, the cyclist represented a particularly tricky experience of modernity that was variously celebrated, controlled, regulated, or even stopped. But by the end of the nineteenth century, southerners had embraced the transformative effects of the bicycle in ways that fostered a new experience and knowledge of both their region and themselves.Footnote 6
This article builds on the new critical writing on the history of the bicycle rather than offering a comprehensive history of the bicycle and cycling in the South. In doing so, it aims to use the bicycle and the experience of cycling as analytics to understand white southerners’ response to a global mass culture in the key decades of the New South's formation.Footnote 7 It addresses two recent trends in the study of the New South. The first places the region within a context broader than the nation. Nan Enstad's work on the global corporate culture of southern cigarette producers and Tore Olsson's recent review of the historiographical shift in southern history towards transnational and global approaches reveal the value of taking a perspective on the region that goes beyond the nation. The bicycle can serve as an important lens through which to view the region's integration with and embrace of the world during the period of the New South.Footnote 8
The second focusses on the creation of a New South identity rooted in a construction of whiteness that intersected with the racial policing of consumer goods. Although historians have largely worked in the wake of Grace Elizabeth Hale, more work can be done looking at the everyday practices that contributed to white southerners’ self-fashioning and how this intersected with the global trends of mass culture. Excellent work by historians such as Karen Cox has made clear the ways in which some white southerners embraced popular culture to better define their “southernness”; at the same time many of the stereotypes of “Dixie” were produced outside the region and sold to the nation.Footnote 9 What is missing from many of these analyses is the juncture of the southern local with the global. As Ruth Oldenziel and Adri Albert de la Bruhèze note, the bicycle, along with the sewing machine, was an early example of “the process by which a globally distributed product is tailored locally to fit local laws, customs, and user preferences and cultures.”Footnote 10 The modern safety bicycle timed perfectly with the rise of the New South and provides a way to examine how white southerners engaged with the globalization of mass culture at the end of the nineteenth century.
Recent insights in geography and science and technology studies on cycling's contribution to both cartographic knowledge and modern subjectivity also allow us to get to grips with the South's experience of industrial modernity. In particular, historical geographer Christine Dando has demonstrated the intersection of cartographic knowledge and the creation of feminine cycling subjectivity in the 1890s. Dando argues that the bicycle was “not just a means of moving through the world but transforming humans’ experience of it.” At the end of the nineteenth century, a new mass culture of mobility changed Americans’ “relationship with their landscape,” creating “the need for not only new products but also new knowledges.”Footnote 11 Likewise, Australian historian Georgine Clarsen has explored the co-development and integration of technologies of reproduction (the Kodak) and mobility (the safety bicycle) to produce new “grammars” of power that interpreted Australia's settler colonial landscape and the indigenous people who inhabited it.Footnote 12 Building on Dando and Clarsen's insights, this article argues that southern white men and women participated in the production of a new “geographic knowledge” embedded in the social and cultural worlds of the bicycle that helped define the contours of a “new” South.Footnote 13
At the end of the nineteenth century, industrial pursuits sought to create a more perfect “human–machine interface.”Footnote 14 As the human body was increasingly thought of as a thermodynamic engine, the bicycle proved to be “a very efficient device for converting physical energy into movement,” notes historian Harry Oosterhuis: “Serving simultaneously as rider, engine and passenger, cyclists were in complete control of their vehicle, and in this respect it was extremely unlike using the other modern mode of transport, the train.” In doing so, suggests anthropologist Louis Vivanco, the bicycle creates a uniquely “temporal fusion or assemblage, between human and machine.” The bicycle introduced a new subjectivity to the masses and created a new type of embodied human, the cyclist.Footnote 15 Cycling was an immensely sensorial experience that elicited an emotional response by the first and only American generation to learn to ride a bicycle as adults. Riding a bicycle created moments of what Jane Bennett has described as the “sensuous enchantment” of modernity: the “strange combination of delight and disturbance.” By balancing and taming the bicycle, white southerners demonstrated and projected their mastery of industrial technology through self-discipline by formulating a new mobile subjectivity.Footnote 16
The modern experience of movement was shaped by technology and mediated by a variety of social, cultural, and economic forces. The city street, itself a global and imperial technology at the end of the nineteenth century, was experienced in profoundly different ways if one was on foot, on a horse, in a wagon, on a bicycle, or later in an automobile. Humans know, sense, and interact with their surrounding world in different ways of moving that are shaped by patterns of social and cultural relations that produce their own “distinctive social relationships, identities, and local cultures.” While the sensorial experience of riding a bicycle is nearly universal, the meanings of these feelings are socially and culturally produced and understood within time and space. The sensual experience of the bicycle, then, is a perfect opportunity to understand the meaning of a new mobile southern identity at the end of the nineteenth century rooted in global cultural forces.Footnote 17
THE GROWTH AND LIMITS OF CYCLING IN THE NEW SOUTH.
The modern safety bicycle – diamond frame, wheels of equal size, and chain drive – arrived almost concurrently across the nation. The experience of cycling, then, was both uniquely southern and universal. In June 1887, only two years after its first production in Coventry, England, an English-made safety arrived in Louisville to glowing acclaim.Footnote 18 Although most bicycles sold in the South were from northern or English manufacturers, a small domestic industry took root in the middle of the 1890s. Louisville's McCurdy Manufacturing Company, like sewing machine manufacturers across the industrialized world, transitioned to bicycle production in the 1890s, showcasing their “Southern Bicycle” at the Metropolitan Cycle Show held in Madison Square Garden. In Birmingham, Alabama, Iron City Cycle produced a twenty-two-pound commuter, while Loosely Cycle boasted a fifteen-pound racer. An investor in Atlanta pledged $75,000 to build a factory with a manufacturing capacity of four thousand bicycles a year. By 1896, Atlanta Machine and Bicycle had a capitalization of $100,000 and three hundred employees. In addition to factories, hundreds of southerners made their living as bicycle mechanics.Footnote 19 The cycle industry required intense specialization and flourished not in heavy industrial centers but in areas with a long history of skilled craftsmen such as the English West Midlands and the Connecticut river valley.Footnote 20 Far removed from popular images of Dixie, the region's bicycle manufacturers and entrepreneurs marked the South's participation in a global high-tech consumer culture.
The major stumbling block for growing cycling in the South, however, was its roads. Confined by poor roads, southerners could be an intensely parochial people. In 1895 a cyclist from Indiana noted that southern “wheel people” greeted him with enthusiasm but rarely accompanied him beyond their town limits, “showing that they had intimate knowledge of their [poor quality] highways.”Footnote 21 It is hard to overstate how bad American, but especially southern, roads were at the end of the nineteenth century. As one scholar notes, by the end of the nineteenth century “no significant investment in either the construction or maintenance of the public road had been made since the Jefferson administration.” Successive American Presidents vetoed federal funding for roads. Public ways were viewed as a state issue often passed on to local communities and municipalities. Cash-strapped towns and cities did the bare minimum to keep up their roads, paving with brick, wood, and cobblestones. In rural areas, local farmers were responsible for the road that ran the length of their property, funded through levies paid in cash, but more often in minimal labor. Most farmers viewed roads as a part of nature at the mercy of the weather in which they only had a small role to play.Footnote 22
In order to encourage cycling by improving the nation's roads, bicycle manufacturers combined with the nation's largest cycling organization, the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), to organize the Good Roads Movement that published its own illustrated magazine, Good Roads. By 1898, the LAW was printing and distributing over a million copies of Good Roads a year and advocating for a radical expansion in government responsibility by using taxation to pay for road construction and maintenance.Footnote 23 LAW divisions across the South pushed the good-roads agenda at the local and state level. The Southern Cycler, the only periodical devoted to cycling in the South in this period, focussed on Louisville but frequently published reports from across the region on the quality of roads. In Atlanta, the Good Roads Club had five hundred members, including Georgia governor William Yates Atkinson and other prominent cyclists on the executive committee. By 1897, the club had secured a six-lap indoor velodrome, a four-mile bicycle pathway, and twenty miles of newly paved roads. The club was also an early advocate for the use of convict labor, the majority of whom were black prisoners, to build public road infrastructure. The Southern Cycler encouraged wheelmen to support the use of convicts in road building and avoid the sticky issue of local taxation. In 1893, Kentucky cyclists waited eagerly for the outcome of a bill that would put the state's “idle convicts” to work on turnpikes and roads for the benefit of bicycles. Across the South, white cyclists were some of the leading voices in road and street improvement as well as for the use of forced labor to bring about these improvements.Footnote 24 In doing so, they created a world in which technological leisure was made possible by exploited black labor for white benefit, setting a disturbing precedent that would continue across the twentieth-century South.Footnote 25
Although urban cyclists in the South used the technology for the utilitarian purposes of mobility, cycling was first and foremost a leisure pursuit in the United States and best experienced outside city limits. As a symbol of the modern and industrial New South, however, the region's urban cyclists were not entirely welcome in the countryside. Horses and mules were easily spooked by the arrival of a bicycle, while planters and croppers resented the intrusion of middle-class urbanites from places like Nashville, Louisville, and Atlanta. Although tension between city and country grew across the nation at the end of the century, it was keenly felt in the South. In the hotbed of populist activity and the People's Party, the region's farmers responded viscerally, sometimes violently, to the bicycle's arrival. It not only represented an intrusion of the city, but was, initially, a symbol for the destruction of an idealized form of rural life.Footnote 26
In June 1897, a Kentucky farmer drove a prominent cyclist off the road with his wagon before whipping and beating the man. Such violent incidents led some southern cyclists to suggest that they should ride armed and be prepared to defend themselves and protect their “rights forcibly, if need be.”Footnote 27 The tension between cyclist and rural citizen was not to last, however, as farmers turned their attention to a more dangerous menace on public highways, the automobile.Footnote 28 By 1907, former Populist firebrand Tom Watson could even report glowingly of a speech by Theodore Roosevelt in which the President believed that easier access to the “bicycle and the telephone” would spur “effective intellectual, political and economic life” for the South's farmers.Footnote 29 During the first decades of the twentieth century, what was once thought of as a symbol of crass and modern life had become a quintessential rite of passage for many rural adolescents and adults.
Like much of the world in the 1890s, the South embraced the technology and cultures of the bicycle. In the early years of the boom, dealers had to be salesmen, builders, mechanics, and instructors rolled into one, while many bicycles were sent north to be repaired for the simplest breakdown. By 1895, larger southern towns and cities could boast of upwards of twenty bicycle agents, many of whom were highly leveraged and shortly collapsed, leaving only those with strong capital resources. Even by the end of the 1890s, the South was still noteworthy for its lack of specialty bicycle shops, with most sales conducted from hardware and general merchandise stores in larger centres, while druggists in small towns tended to sell bicycles (Figure 1). Despite these drawbacks, the bicycle trade was still considered profitable in the South and a trade magazine predicted continued growth. In 1894, the American Cyclist reported that Charleston, South Carolina had three hundred cyclists with a $5,000 cement track, Savannah had seven hundred cyclists and a $12,000 track, while Atlanta could boast of over a thousand cyclists. For southern manufacturers in the region's growing New South cities, the bicycle projected the region's industrial modernity. And while there was an initial resistance to the bicycle both by governments seeking to regulate citizens and by southerners in the rural hinterland, by the end of the century the bicycle was utilized across the South. In doing so, white southerners embraced a new mobile subjectivity rooted in the personal consumption of technological products.Footnote 30
Figure 1. “Group of men and children with bicycles in front of the B. L. Malone grocery store, probably in New Decatur, Alabama,” 1898. 7N/A/5c, Box 4, Scrapbook 1, Ellen and C. J. Hildreth Collection, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, AL.
SOUTHERN CYCLING AND MOBILE SUBJECTIVITY
In its initial social articulation, cycling was a way for southern white men to confirm their ease with modernity, strengthen class bonds, and assert a new masculinity rooted in strenuous activity. For southern white women, the bicycle was a technological agent for liberation. At the same time, the very public act of cycling created new opportunities for surveillance that led to self-adjustments in women's appearance and bodily comportment. In each case, a new sense of selfhood was formed through the act of cycling that led white southerners to new interpretations of themselves and their region.
Cycling clubs could be ostentatious in their displays of wealth. The Southern Wheelmen's clubhouse in New Orleans was a four-story brick structure set back from St. Charles Avenue. It featured a basement with a billiard room and storage for seventy-five bicycles. The ground floor had a secretary's office, reading room, and parlors. The next two floors had a variety of games rooms as well as guest accommodation. The club was organized as a limited company with an initial offering of $50,000 divided into two thousand shares of twenty-five dollars each. Membership was limited to six hundred. The Piedmont Cycle Club of Atlanta consisted of one hundred members, including the “leading bankers, merchants and professional men” of the city. Club membership gave exclusive access to a private four-mile cycle path. Brick cycling clubhouses could be found in many cities across the South and spoke to the elite pretensions of cycling in the early 1890s.Footnote 31
Beyond class status, the bicycle was also a way for southern middle-class men to assert a masculinity through sporting prowess. Cycle racing was an intensely competitive and popular sport in the South. For a region often stereotyped by its slowness, racing proved that southerners could not only embrace but be on the vanguard of this new world of modern speed. Louisville claimed to have built the nation's first quarter-mile outdoor track specifically for cycle racing, held the first outdoor race illuminated by electric light in the world, and boasted the fastest three-lap cement track in the nation. “There doesn't seem to be anything unreasonably slow in all that,” bragged the Southern Cycler.Footnote 32 The race track at Fontaine Ferry would become a winter training spot for some of the nation's best cyclists. Nationally significant tracks could also be found in New Orleans, Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston, Memphis, Jacksonville, and Bellaire, Florida. In the spring of 1895, the first southern bicycle series, the Southern Circuit, opened in Knoxville and attracted top riders from around the nation. Thousands of southerners routinely turned out to witness the spectacle. Demand was so great in Memphis that the city constructed a cement track with a capacity for ten thousand spectators, while Jacksonville created a segregated section at its track to cater to the increasing number of black cycling fans.Footnote 33
As the cost of the bicycle rapidly declined across the 1890s, the popularity of racing also shifted downwards. By 1896, southern divisions of the LAW were concerned that professionalization would attract less gentlemanly riders, threatening bicycle racing's status as an expression of white middle-class masculinity. Central to this was the question of Sunday racing. Although southern cycling officials were concerned with the spiritual and moral issues that arose with racing on the Sabbath, their primary concern was that “the attendance at Sunday events would be drawn almost entirely from a class that would attend at no other time, and could contribute nothing to the respectability of the sport.”Footnote 34 For similar reasons, the southern LAW was against the physical brutality of the Six-Day Race: a race in which a pair of cyclists, competing against other pairs, pedaled around a velodrome for six days nonstop. The pair that covered the most distance won. The Six-Day was the cycling discipline that best captured the Western world's obsession with labor, energy, and fatigue. The riders were described as “human cycling machine[s]” that seemed to blur the line between technology and humanity. Fatalities from exhaustion and crashes were not uncommon.Footnote 35 “Cycle racing,” noted the Southern Cycler, “thanks to the elevating influences of the L.A.W., has heretofore been a comparatively clean and high-toned sport, and it would be a great misfortune for it to degenerate into the brutality of prize fighting or the corruption of horse racing.”Footnote 36 Bicycle racing, but especially the Six-Day, sought the limits of what the body could do and be in the industrial age. White New South men attempted to navigate this new world of modern speed, while retaining a masculinity rooted in the legacies of plantation culture. In doing so, they negotiated an uneasy alliance between human and machine.
The most famous southern cyclist of the period was Robert “Bobby” Walthour Sr., who worked his way up from an Atlanta bicycle messenger to be one of the wealthiest athletes of the time, racing and residing in both the United States and Europe. Born in 1878, Walthour had deep roots in the South. His ancestors had migrated to Georgia from Austria in the eighteenth century, become plantation owners, and established the town of Walthourville in 1795. In the middle of the nineteenth century the Walthour family had helped construct the first rail line between Atlanta and Savannah. Throughout his successful career, Walthour's southern identity played a central role in his racing persona. In 1903, he teamed up with Memphis-born Benny Munro to form the “Dixie Flyers” and throughout his career Walthour would be known as the “Dixie Flyer” in both the American and French press.Footnote 37
Walthour first made a name for himself by winning the 1901 Madison Square Garden Six-Day, where ten thousand people watched him and his partner, Archie McEachern, race to victory. Walthour ascribed his victory to his good physical condition, his ability to take on liquid food while riding, and his “foreign” competitors using too many performance-enhancing drugs at the start of the race. For his part Walthour stayed clear of the low levels of strychnine routinely administered to riders, although he made sure to mention that he took advantage of the natural cocaine and caffeine found in his home state's Coca-Cola to help keep him awake. Over the course of the six days he claimed to have slept for ten minutes at a time for three hours in total. Walthour was one of the preeminent human motors of the day, holding multiple world records in a variety of disciplines. So spectacular and popular was Walthour's feat that the Orpheum Theatre in Brooklyn paid him $300 to ride a home trainer onstage for three miles every afternoon and night (Figure 2).Footnote 38
Figure 2. Atlantan Bobby Walthour was one of the premier “human motors” of the era. In this photograph dating from January 1914, the sheer exhaustion of racing a Parisian Six-Day is written on his face. As a member of the “Dixie Flyers,” Walthour was one of the best-known southern sporting figures in the world at the turn of the last century. Courtesy Gallica, bibliothèque nationale de France.
Not the languid southerner found in the day's popular culture, Walthour's physical ability, self-control, and ease at modern life made him one of the most famous athletes of the Gilded Age. In the 1902 season alone he brought home $25,000 – roughly $810,000 in today's dollars.Footnote 39 At the 1903 Madison Square Garden Six-Day, Walthour was described as the “pride of the South,” sustaining the best of “southern traditions.”Footnote 40 At other times, northern papers suggested that he fared poorly in cold weather due to a predisposition for the “warmer climates” of the South.Footnote 41 Part of Walthour's appeal relied on maintaining an air of southern middle-class respectability and honor in an increasingly working-class and professional sport. Walthour would later credit his success to two things: “the physical development received in the Y.M.C.A. and … the clean, moral life, urged upon me through its influences.”Footnote 42 Although a messy divorce in 1920 later undermined some of his claims to respectability, during Walthour's time as one of the most famous cyclists in the world, he never strayed far from his identity as a white southerner.Footnote 43
Bicycle racing reveals the southern elite's and middle class's paradoxical relationship with industrial modernity. On the one hand, the bicycle race was celebrated as a test of southern manhood's suitability for the modern world, while on the other hand there was a lurking fear that the same factory rhythms that made the bicycle possible could disrupt this gentlemanly ideal rooted in the fiction of Dixie. By the start of the twentieth century, southerners and the LAW would lose their fight to keep the sport of cycling respectable, while automobile racing provided a new avenue for the South's elite to demonstrate their modern speed and wealth.Footnote 44 Southern white men, however, were not the only ones to embrace the bicycle to affirm their class and modern status. White women were also drawn to the bicycle's revolutionary potential to transform gendered expectations and expand mobility.
Women around the world embraced the bicycle as way to push into public spaces and make claims on the ownership of their bodies. Cycling, however, was a public performance rooted in class identity. Most women cyclists in the 1890s continued to wear Victorian dress instead of bloomers and, as the sheer amount of innuendo and risqué and even pornographic bicycle advertisements and photographs can attest, although liberating and empowering, the public nature of cycling meant that women remained firmly within the gaze and often control of men.Footnote 45 Such objectification and surveillance did not stop southern women from exercising and developing their own forms of agency, however. The bicycle gave the South's society women a heretofore unprecedented independence outside the home and cycling was a form of pleasure and performance. The Atlanta “ladies cycle club” had four hundred members and their own clubhouse on Peachtree Street. Nor was the phenomenon confined to major cities; in Meridian, Mississippi women led the boom (Figure 3).Footnote 46 In 1938, Hattie Thomas of Barbour County, Alabama told a WPA interviewer that she had ridden her bicycle every day for forty-three years. Her first bicycle in 1895 had given her independence and allowed her to find employment first at the telephone office and then as a reporter. At the age of sixty-five she continued to cycle to work at the Bland Coal and Transfer Company, doing a “man's job,” while using her bicycle on the weekend to spend time with her grandchildren and commune with nature.Footnote 47
Figure 3. “Photograph of Florence Timmerman with a new bicycle,” Lanier County, Georgia, 1900. Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia Collection, Ian006.
The bicycle also gave athletically inclined southern women a chance to prove their physical ability. On a Saturday in November 1895 a Louisville businessman organized a group ride that featured several local women. One young woman, identified as a “Miss R—,” outrode her male companions. At the first big test, Blind Asylum Hill, she pulled away from the pack. Later, because of the dust created by the group, she moved to the front and dropped her fellow cyclists. “On went the flying figure not noting that gradually the worried riders in the rear were falling further behind,” reported the Southern Cycler. After fifteen miles they reached their destination and, “without the vestige of discomposure in countenance or disarrangement of a lock of hair, she hoped they had enjoyed the ride, and with a winsome smile asked how they ‘liked the pace.’” While it is obvious that the young woman enjoyed putting her male companions in discomfort, their unease with her abilities and disturbance of physical and social norms is also clear. Her name is hinted at but not given and the reader is reassured that she “attended all religious services the next day” but that “no one would ride with her back that Sunday afternoon after church.”Footnote 48
The dual nature of women's cycling – of freedom and surveillance – is apparent in a regular feature of the Southern Cycler in which women cyclists were celebrated for their independence but also monitored. “Among the Bloomerites” was written “By One of ’Em” and details the “pioneering” women of the South who took up cycling in the 1890s. Bettie Todd, a Louisville socialite, was the first to wear bloomers and was quickly joined by the upscale St. James Court crowd. Todd was celebrated for her bravery, and her choice to don rational clothing led to “Louisville ladies, finding the bloomer a sensible, comfortable costume … adopted it generally, thus deriving more pleasure and enjoyment from riding.” Other women took to wearing even more comfortable, yet revealing, clothing. Mamie Dely cycled through Louisville wearing a “short skirt” that reached just below her knees, her shins and ankles covered by brown leggings. Although women cyclists first appeared on the streets of Lexington, Kentucky in 1891, four years later the presence of bloomer-wearing cyclists could still attract “all the boys [to have] a peep at them.” Leering men in Lexington led the prominent women of the city to form their own cycle club as a matter of protection in numbers. “For some time past many ladies have desired to ride,” noted the Southern Cycler, “but fear of becoming unpleasantly conspicuous has deterred them.”Footnote 49 The sexual objectification and harassment of women cyclists meant that they needed to bound together for their own safety. Southern women could be so conspicuous on their bicycles that they were named in national magazines. Such was the case of “Miss Tangier of Atlanta … [a] vigorous healthy looking southern girl” who had only been riding a bicycle for a month and was already an accomplished hill climber and public proponent for bloomers and rational dress.Footnote 50 The bicycle has rightfully been celebrated as an agent for feminine liberation. At the same time, similar experiences as in Lexington where women were subjected to increased male surveillance no doubt limited the extent of women's participation.
The sexualized dynamics of cycling ensured that for many southern clergy and upholders of Victorian values, bicycles competed with mail order catalogues as the means by which the outside world corrupted the South.Footnote 51 In the 1890s, the bicycle was understood as a technology of mobility, but also of sex. From Germany to England to the United States, male medical doctors solemnly debated not only the possible damage done to a woman's reproductive organs but also the likelihood that cycling was sexually stimulating and could lead to deranged sexualized women.Footnote 52 In the South's major cities, bloomer costumes were initially viewed as an immoral and unwelcome intrusion of sexualized northern fashion. The Atlanta Journal suggested that the city should adopt a by-law, as had Chattanooga, that outlawed women wearing bloomers. The Atlanta Constitution was more sanguine to the coming of the bloomer but still believed that women should “exercise prudence in the extreme” when cycling.Footnote 53 In 1901, James Avirett, in his memoir of life in the Old South, singled out the bicycle as second only to divorce as a sign of the corrupting influence of the modern world on southern life. The bicycle's transformation of the woman cyclist was social, cultural, and corporeal: “how far the bicycle has robbed the young ladies of this age of graceful form and motion, I know not,” complained Avirett.Footnote 54
Although the bloomer panic soon subsided, clergy members were not necessarily wrong in believing that cycling led to unchaperoned social time and courtship. In June 1893, for instance, Robert Bissett of Maysville, Kentucky wrote to his friend James Adair that he had purchased a bicycle (a Waverly) and that his very first journey was to see a young woman named Hortense, before asking if James had heard from “Lizzie,” who was angry that “everybody is crazy here over bicycles.” By July, Lizzie's anger had subsided but she was still concerned that James was willing to cycle to see her in the summer heat. Such courting, facilitated by the personal freedom of the bicycle, took place throughout the South and opened up new worlds for the region's young adults. Bicycle advertisements often pushed this narrative by hinting at the sexual possibilities of cycling with images of young men and women cycling alone into a nearby forest away from prying eyes.Footnote 55
By the start of the twentieth century, bicycles and bloomers came to be accepted by some of the South's middle-class and elite women. It proved that they were of the age, integrated with a global mass culture, and at ease with the speed of modernity. The initial fear of bloomers was as much a fear of the outside as it was propriety. For the South, the bicycle intensified internal divisions between those who wished the region to remain traditional and those who embraced the symbols of modern life rooted in conspicuous consumption. When a member of the Alabama legislature introduced a bill in 1896, quoting Deuteronomy, that would ban women from “wearing bloomers, tights, shirt-waists, or other articles of men's apparel,” he was labelled “old fashioned” and “backwoods.” The Southern Cycler dismissed the state congressman as someone who had never been to a “big city” nor “to a town of even the size of Montgomery before.” For the many men and women of the South's towns and cities the bicycle was a technology that helped foster a new mobile subjectivity and embraced the bicycle as a symbol of a modern New South that participated in the fashion and trends of global mass culture.Footnote 56
CYCLING AND THE SOUTHERN LANDSCAPE
When urban cyclists pushed into the countryside they created real and mental maps of the southern landscape. With roads of such poor quality much of the South was restricted to local knowledge. Locomotives might connect towns to cities but the places in between and the quality of the roads were largely unknown to outsiders. Tom Winder – an adventurer who cycled the circumference of the United States for the Buffalo Express – recommended that cyclo-tourists in the South “stay by the railroad tracks” in order to not get lost.Footnote 57 Faced with poor roads and conditions for cycling, the South's cyclists played an important role in mapping, understanding, and reimagining the region at the end of the nineteenth century, helping urban cyclists to create “psychogeographies” of the rural South.Footnote 58 The cyclist's cartographic knowledge helped assert a new urban authority over the rural countryside. Mapmaking produces as much as it represents a landscape and is therefore a technology of power and rule alongside other more explicitly violent tools of suppression.Footnote 59 For a region that had long been under the sway of a planter elite, the move towards city and town was a significant change and the popularity of cycling played no small part in the South's shifting political landscape.
Southern divisions of the League of American Wheelmen published roadbooks that outlined which roads to take and which to avoid. In 1896, a Kentucky cyclist finished the most “complete” road map ever created for the state. It contained four hundred routes leading to every part of Kentucky, as well as new routes from Cincinnati to Louisville and Louisville to Mammoth Cave. Three years later, in 1899, the “Jolly Good Fellows” compiled a master map of road cycling routes in the vicinity of Louisville. When cycling maps indicated whether “good” roads were “level, rolling, hilly, or very hilly” and whether the surface was “dirt, macadam, or gravel,” they not only were descriptions of physical and topographical reality but also helped the South's urban cyclists conceive of and occupy the rural in-between spaces of the region.Footnote 60
Articles on cycling trips in the South often devolved into reports on local road conditions, as was the case of E. L. Evans and A. W. Edwards's thousand-mile bicycle ride from Louisville to Atlanta and back for the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition on behalf of “Kis-Me Gum and Higgins’ Shoes.” Evans's account of their trip reveals the ways the urban cyclist produced regional knowledge of the rural hinterland, bringing with them, in addition to the bicycle, products of mass culture and industry: chewing gum and factory-made shoes. In his recounting, each section of the journey through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia is compiled with detailed descriptions of road quality and topography. Far from alone on their journey, Evans and Edwards meet other cyclo-tourists from across the Midwest and the East Coast heading to the great southern exposition. Along the way the South's rural population was rendered as part of the landscape and behind the times. Whether it was when they frightened a team of mules driven by a black driver heading into Bardstown or when they complained of the poor fare they received at rural inns and public houses, Evans was sure to emphasize his sophistication and authority rooted in both his whiteness and his town credentials.Footnote 61
At the height of the boom in 1896, Louisville real-estate developer Lewis A. Walters penned an unpublished travelogue of a journey to the Blue Grass region. Walters was like many white southern cycling enthusiasts. He was part of a rising class of men who had profited from the expansion of the region's urban centers at the end of the century.Footnote 62 His trip began only after he had read in a LAW roadbook of the beautiful scenery to be found in the nearby Blue Grass region. For men like Walters, cycling was a sensuous experience that reaffirmed a relationship to the southern landscape. Indeed, despite being from Louisville, Walters had never been to the Blue Grass region until prompted to by his new enthusiasm for the bicycle. Leaving Louisville at the height of spring, Walters took a train to Harrodsburg, where he spent the night before cycling to Pleasant Hill, the site of an active Shaker community, returning the way he had come. As he cycled into the countryside his senses were elevated in a way that condemned the urban life he was, as a real-estate developer, responsible for creating. Walters believed that the bicycle created a “new existence” for humanity. The journey was therapeutic as the “cares of the city [were] laid aside for the peace of the country, all the hurry and wild energy is wooed into quiet contemplative contentment.” The enhanced sensory experience of cycling separated the city from the country but also created a sense of meditation. Walters's emotions, however, were not simply another therapeutic panacea for the ills of modernity. For Walters, as for many first-time bicycle users at the end of the nineteenth century, cycling led to a more contemplative sense of self and produced a visceral connection to an idealized landscape.Footnote 63
Every weekend, urbanites cycled into the countryside, making clear a demarcation between their modernity and those viewed as left behind. Armed with their Kodaks, cyclists’ photographic reproduction went hand in hand with mapmaking and were ways in which a cartographic knowledge of the southern landscape was constructed and produced, making it an ideological extension of the city (Figure 4).Footnote 64 These men and women were in the process of fashioning new power arrangements over the region's traditional political base. Many believed that the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition – the great celebration of southern industry and the New South – would be the turning point for the region. The exposition was to be “an educator to the masses,” proving that the bicycle was not a “fad” and would showcase the South as a “veritable wheelman's paradise [for] northern riders to come and spend the holidays in the land of sunshine and flowers.” In the minds of many, cycling was a key symbol of the New South and represented a transformation of southern society.Footnote 65
Figure 4. “Winder, 1893. Members of the Ramblers, a bicycle club, out for a ride.” Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia Collection, Brw100.
For New South boosters, political and social change was as much about a personal transformation as it was a program for northern investment and industrialization.Footnote 66 They were not unlike their northern counterparts, who adopted a “therapeutic worldview” at the end of the century to assuage the feelings of weightlessness that accompanied modernity.Footnote 67 For many urban southerners, cycling represented a solution to this problem. On the one hand, it was a luxury good at the forefront of modernity; on the other hand, its need for self-control and strenuous effort made it a curative device that addressed the neurasthenic nature of modern life, or, as suggested by a cycling pamphlet distributed in the South, a civilized way to “retain a little savage in us.”Footnote 68
When cyclo-tourists came from outside the South, however, they focussed less on the region's landscape or developing urban worlds than on the region's people and their supposed backwardness. Many cycling commentators noted that southerners had in fact more than a “little savage” left in them. For Tom Winder on his 274-day circumnavigation, the South was like entering a foreign space and time compared to the speed and modernity he believed his bicycle represented. In Louisiana, he noted that African Americans’ raised platform houses reminded him of the “pictures one sees of the South Sea islanders.” In Virginia, he described a landscape of “deserted farms” and “worn-out” land. In Georgia, his bicycle opened up spaces for him to scientifically observe the local population using the language of the new science of racial anthropology. He reported to his readers that the “Cracker is born, not made,” and should be considered a separate “species of humanity.” The advances made by rural whites were not a real change, according to Winder, instead country whites were more like an “educated parrot.” His journey also gave him an opportunity to assess and analyse the “Wiregrass” and “Mountain” “types” of “Crackers.” Black southerners also did not escape Winder's northern gaze and his chapters on the South relied on the racist stereotypes of the minstrel stage in its descriptions of black life. White and black southerners, of course, would have bristled at Winder's characterization of them, especially as both groups had, by the middle of the 1890s, embraced the bicycle as a key symbol of their modernity.Footnote 69
Likewise, Outing – the national outdoors magazine that began life as Wheelman – included travelogues of journeys to the South alongside more far-flung places like Europe, Asia, and Africa. In these stories the urban cyclist marks their modernity against a primitive South with the same language as cyclists describing their voyages overseas. One such journey was that of Hellen Huntington, who, along with her girlfriend and two male companions, rode a tandem bicycle through northern Georgia. Cycling intensified the differences between themselves and what they saw. The rural southern landscape was unfamiliar, populated with “rough log shacks, with queer little box attachments.” At a plantation a “whole family, or rather tribe … gathered to inspect our wheels.” At a religious camp meeting, Huntington and her cycling companions – who were in complete control of their bodies and machines – compare themselves to the “wild” and “frantic” gestures of the participants.Footnote 70
The bicycle in the South cut both ways. On the one hand, cycling confirmed the region's modernity and embrace of global trends, while on the other hand it opened up space away from towns and rail lines for both northerners and urban southerners to confront the South's supposedly primitive and problem status within the nation. At the end of the nineteenth century, the bicycle marked a radical departure in human movement. This rupture produced a strong sense of difference between the cyclist and those they encountered. It magnified the different ways in which rural southerners lived their lives and reified the position of urban whites atop a contingent social and racial hierarchy dependent on familiarity with new industrial technologies. In this way, cycling was paradigmatic of white southerners’ struggle to define their region in the face of an expanding national and global culture rooted in the world's industrializing metropolises.Footnote 71
THE SOUTH AND GLOBAL MASS CULTURE
White southerners’ cycling subjectivity and regional knowledge were not created in a vacuum, however. The global nature of cycling culture meant that many white cycling enthusiasts were keenly aware of what was happening beyond the South. The southern elite had enjoyed European sojourns since the antebellum period, but in a world of global mass cultures, middle-class white southerners, if not actually travelling to Europe, became interested in cycling cultures outside their region and nation. When southern cycling enthusiasts picked up the latest issue of the Southern Cycler or any of the national trade periodicals sold in the region, they not only participated in the imagined space of the region and nation but also took part in the global culture of the bicycle. Southern cyclists, then, often operated at the intersection of the local and global.
Throughout its short print run the Southern Cycler maintained a London correspondent to report on cycling events and trends in Europe. Louisville-based racing cyclist Thomas Dewhurst's first report back from London was coverage of the Stanley Cycle Show and the question of bloomers, which were “not very common here among lady riders.” A month later, he reported on London's new cutting-edge cycling track at Herne Hill, while the magazine covered the controversial introduction of bicycle taxes in Britain and Austria, along with a report of a new velodrome in Italy. Dewhurst would keep up his regular reporting before returning to the South in the summer of 1895 to race the season in Kentucky.Footnote 72 By the following year, the Southern Cycler had a permanent English representative based in Derbyshire, T. Thyne Millar, and had increased its publication to twice a month. It also expanded its coverage beyond the Continent. In Mexico City, Tom Crump, a former resident of Louisville working for Victory Cycles and the American Photo-Supply Company, sent reports back to the Southern Cycler. In much the same way as the bicycle was representative of southern modernity, Mexico City's status as one of the most “modern … cities of the world” was, according to Crump, “indicated by the interest displayed in the bicycle.”Footnote 73 Most of the magazine's attention, however, remained on Europe, with reports of a French cyclist's death during the three-hundred-kilometer Le petit marseillais road race, a racing cyclist from Memphis heading to Europe to test his skills, and further reports from London's cycling showcases sent back from Dewhurst. Such reporting fueled southern cyclists’ global imagination.Footnote 74
For a few white southerners such imaginations became a reality. In the summer of 1921, Walter Newman Haldeman II, the son of the Louisville Courier-Journal's editor and grandson of a Confederate navy officer, spent two weeks cycling from Leamington Spa across the West Midlands and then on to north Wales. On the journey he observed differences between the growing culture and industrial significance of the United States and the fading power of Britain. The bicycle allowed him to move beyond the curated tourist trail of the rail line, and he noted that England was “not so clean” as it first appeared with the “flies thick in all village inns,” but conceded that most English villages were nicer than his southern ones. However, the “British slowness so much talked about is an actual fact,” and everywhere he went he heard “America's songs [and] rags.” In Wales, he was surprised that many of its inhabitants continued to speak Welsh, a language Haldeman believed was “primitive, and a little barbaric.” For Haldeman, the two-week cycling journey through the heart of Britain was a revelation and an important personal step as an American and a southerner. It confirmed his sense of the United States as the future and Britain as a place of the past. A somewhat awkward conclusion, given that his home region of the South was thought of as a national problem that needed to be fixed often with the same tools of empire that the British had employed around the globe.Footnote 75
Extraordinary technologies, like the bicycle, quickly become ordinary and mundane. And yet they can have a lasting influence on both human perception and the social and cultural worlds produced by new ways of knowing and being. As much as the southern experience of the bicycle reflected local practices and traditions, southern cyclists connected to a global mass culture. Across crucial decades in the New South's formation, the safety bicycle went from an astonishing innovation to an “everyday technology.” In doing so, cycling can be a lens through which we can view the South's integration in a larger world of mass culture and technology at the turn of the twentieth century.Footnote 76 In self-fashioning a mobile subjectivity, southern white men and women embraced a transnational and transregional phenomenon that integrated their local experiences with the world. Initially a symbol of wealth and status, the bicycle came to occupy a place in the urban South's imagination as it pushed its influence into the rural hinterland. Cycling opened up the South's rural spaces to city life and expectations. Rather than being removed from the trends of modern mass culture, white southerners in towns and cities embraced the transformative nature of cycling and adopted a global worldview that contradicts the perception of the region's peripheral status both within and outside the nation at the end of the nineteenth century.
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