Moon Coastal Carolinas

by Jim Morekis

  A major change that came during this time is rarely remarked upon in the history books: This was when South Carolina became a majority white state. With thousands of African Americans leaving for more tolerant pastures and more economic opportunity in the North and the West—a move known as the Great Migration—the demographics of the state changed accordingly.

  The arrival of the tiny but devastating boll weevil all but wiped out the cotton trade on the coast after the turn of the century, forcing the economy to diversify. Naval stores and lumbering were the order of the day at the advent of World War I, the combined patriotic effort for which did wonders in repairing the wounds of the Civil War, still vivid in many local memories.

  A major legacy of World War I that still greatly influences life in the Lowcountry is the Marine Corps Recruiting Depot Parris Island, which began life as a small Marine camp in 1919.

  First in Flight

  The lonely Outer Banks of North Carolina hosted one of the seminal events in human history, with the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight.

  Born in Indiana and raised in Dayton, Ohio, neither Orville and Wilbur Wright graduated from college. They opened a bicycle shop in Dayton and used the profits to fund their growing interest in aviation.

  Wilbur, the more aggressive of the two, was inspired by the flight of birds to make groundbreaking research into wing design. Another key difference between the Wrights’ work and other concurrent aviation minds was that the brothers insisted on the pilot having total control over the aircraft, as opposed to being totally dependent on prevailing winds.

  To bring their ideas to fruition, in 1900 the Wrights traveled to remote and then barely-inhabited Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, which they picked for two reasons: First, the sea breeze and soft sand were conducive to flight experiments; and just as importantly, no reporters were likely to follow them there and prematurely reveal their designs and methods.

  For two full years, they worked on nothing but gliders, launching them off of Kill Devil Hill, the highest point on this part of the Outer Banks. In late 1903, however, the “Wright Flyer One” was ready for takeoff. Wilbur won a coin toss to see who would pilot the first flight, an ill-fated three-second trip that damaged the craft.

  When the Flyer was repaired, it was quiet Orville who would pilot the historic “real” first flight, a 12-second, 120-foot trip across the sandy scrub at the base of Kill Devil Hill on December 17, 1903. It is this flight which is recorded in the famous photograph instantly recognizable the world over.

  Fame was long in coming, however. Despite the presence of a handful of witnesses—not to mention the photo—no one quite believed the Wright Brothers had actually managed controlled, powered flight.

  For a time, this suited the Wrights just fine, since they had not yet received a patent for their revolutionary wing design and were still fearful their work would be pirated by others. They continued working in relative anonymity back in Dayton, until finally receiving a patent in 1906, after which a whirlwind of transatlantic business negotiations followed.

  The skeptical French were wowed by a display in August 1908, which stunned a crowd at Le Mans with a nearly two-minute powered flight that included several graceful banked turns.

  The famously protective Wrights continued to defend their patents, with mixed results, against other businesspeople. While they never profited as much as they wanted from their invention, history still reveres the brilliant, oddball brothers as the fathers of aviation.

  In the kind of win-win situation that was unfortunately lacking in the Wright Brothers’ business activities, the states of Ohio and North Carolina have worked out a compromise of sorts to share the Wright legacy. Ohio calls itself “The Birthplace of Aviation Pioneers” (a nod to the fact that astronauts John Glenn and Neil Armstrong are also Ohioans), whereas the Tarheel State claims as its motto “First in Flight.”

  The Roaring Twenties

  In the boom period following World War I, North Carolina was the most industrialized state in the South, chiefly due to its healthy textile trade. The tobacco crop as well was particularly profitable.

  During this time, Charleston, South Carolina, entered the world stage and made some of its most significant cultural contributions to American life. The “Charleston” dance, originated on the streets of the Holy City and popularized in New York, would sweep the world. The Jenkins Orphanage Band, often credited with the dance, traveled the world, even playing at President Taft’s inauguration.

  In the visual arts, the “Charleston Renaissance” took off, specifically intended to introduce the Holy City to a wider audience. Key work included the Asian-influenced work of self-taught painter Alice Ravenel Huger Smith and the etchings of Elizabeth O’Neill Verner. Edward Hopper was a visitor to Charleston during that time and produced several noted watercolors. The Gibbes Art Gallery, now the Gibbes Museum of Art, opened in 1905.

  Recognizing the cultural importance of the city and its history, in 1920 socialite Susan Pringle Frost and other concerned Charlestonians formed the Preservation Society of Charleston, the oldest community-based historic preservation organization in America.

  In 1924, lauded Charleston author DuBose Heyward wrote the locally set novel Porgy. With Heyward’s cooperation, the book would soon be turned into the first American opera, Porgy and Bess, by George Gershwin, who labored over the composition in a cottage on Folly Beach, South Carolina. Ironically, Porgy and Bess, which premiered with an African American cast in New York in 1935, wouldn’t be performed in its actual setting until 1970 because of segregation laws.

  And in a foreshadowing of a future tourist boom to come, the Pine Lakes golf course opened in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in 1927, the first on the Grand Strand.

  A NEW DEAL

  Alas, the good times didn’t last. The Great Depression hit the South hard, but since wages and industry were already behind the national average, the economic damage wasn’t as bad as elsewhere in the country. As elsewhere in the South and indeed across the country, public works programs in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal helped not only to keep locals employed, but contributed greatly to the cultural and archaeological record of the area.

  The Public Works of Art Project stimulated the visual arts. The Works Progress Administration renovated the old Dock Street Theatre in Charleston, and theatrical productions once again graced that historic stage. You can still enjoy the network of state parks built in South Carolina by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

  As important and broadly supported as the New Deal was in the Carolinas, the primarily rural nature of both states meant a less vigorous and concentrated lobbying effort in Washington DC, to free up funding. Hence, the per capita benefit of the New Deal in the Carolinas was actually significantly less than for other states.

  WORLD WAR II AND THE MODERN ERA

  With the attack on Pearl Harbor and the coming of World War II, life in America and the Carolinas would never be the same. Military funding and facilities swarmed into the area, and populations and long-depressed living standards rose as a result. Here are some key wartime developments on the coast:

  • In 1941 construction began in Onslow County on what would become Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune near Jacksonville, North Carolina. A satellite facility of Camp Lejeune, Montford Point (now called Camp Gilbert H. Johnston), trained 20,000 African American Marines 1942-1947, when the U.S. military was still segregated.

  • Also in 1941, construction began on what would become Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, which trained Marine aviators for service in the Pacific theater of operations.

  • Though Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, was begun in 1918, it really got on the map during World War II as a major training facility. Immediately following World War II, Fort Bragg became the operations and training center for the U.S. Army Special Forces, and it remains so to this day.

  • The Charleston Navy Yard became that city’s largest employer, and the population soare
d as workers crowded in.

  • Down in Walterboro, South Carolina, the Tuskegee Airmen, a highly-decorated group of African American fighter pilots, trained for their missions escorting bombing raids over Germany. Walterboro also hosted a large German POW camp.

  • The Marine Corp Recruiting Depot Parris Island in South Carolina expanded massively, training nearly a quarter-million recruits 1941-1945.

  • The entire 1944 graduating class of The Citadel in Charleston was inducted into the armed forces—possibly the only time an entire class was drafted at once.

  The war particularly hit home in North Carolina, which trained more soldiers than any other state in its 24 bases. The hottest spot for German U-boat attacks on the U.S. eastern seaboard was off the Outer Banks. Residents—living in blackout conditions at night—would often see explosions just offshore as American merchant ships were sunk by the submarines. To this day the sea bottom on the coast is littered with over 60 sunken vessels from this dark time—including at least three destroyed U-boats.

  Then of course there’s the famous battleship USS North Carolina, which participated in every major naval campaign of the war’s Pacific theater of operations. When commissioned in April 1941, it was considered the most advanced, if not the largest, battleship in the world. Decommissioned after the war, the ship spent 14 years anchored in New Jersey. Scheduled to be scrapped, it was saved by a conservation and fundraising effort in the late 1950s, which brought the great warship back to its namesake state in 1961. Today berthed in Wilmington, the North Carolina is a major tourist attraction and a stirring tribute to a key chapter in U.S. naval history.

  The Postwar Boom

  Myrtle Beach and the Grand Strand were already the breeding ground of that unique South Carolina dance called the shag. The postwar era marked the shag’s heyday, as carefree young South Carolinians flocked to beachfront pavilions to enjoy this indigenous form of music, sort of a white variation on the regional black rhythm ‘n’ blues of the time.

  America’s post-war infatuation with the automobile—and its troublesome child, the suburb—brought exponential growth to the great cities of the coast. The first bridge to Hilton Head Island was built in 1956, leading to the first of many resort developments on the island, Sea Pines, in 1961. In many outlying Sea Islands, electricity came for the first time.

  With rising coastal populations came pressure to demolish more and more fine old buildings to put parking lots and high-rises in their place; a backlash grew among the cities’ elites, aghast at the destruction of so much history. The immediate postwar era brought about the formation of the Historic Charleston Foundation, which began the financially and politically difficult work of protecting the historic districts from the wrecking ball of “progress.”

  They weren’t always successful, but the work of these organizations—mostly comprising older women from the upper crust—laid the foundation for the successful coastal tourist industry to come, as well as preserved important American history for the ages.

  Civil Rights

  Contrary to popular opinion, the civil rights era wasn’t just a blip in the 1960s. The gains of that decade were the fruits of efforts begun decades prior.

  Many of the efforts involved expanding black suffrage. Though African Americans secured the nominal right to vote years before, primary contests were not under the jurisdiction of federal law. As a result, Democratic Party primary elections—the de facto general elections because of that party’s total dominance in the South at the time—were effectively closed to African American voters.

  In Charleston, the Democratic primary was opened to African Americans for the first time in 1947. In 1960, the Charleston Municipal Golf Course voluntarily integrated to avoid a court battle. Lunch counter sit-ins happened all over South Carolina, including the episode of the “Friendship Nine” in Rock Hill. Martin Luther King Jr. visited South Carolina in the late 1960s, speaking in Charleston in 1967 and helping reestablish the Penn Center on St. Helena Island as not only a cultural center, but a center of political activism as well.

  The hundred-day strike of hospital workers at the Medical University of South Carolina in 1969—right after King’s assassination—got national attention and was the culmination of Charleston’s struggle for civil rights. By the end of the 1960s, the city council of Charleston had elected its first black alderman, and the next phase in local history began.

  A Coast Reborn

  While the story of the South Carolina coastal boom actually begins in the 1950s with Charles Fraser’s development of Sea Pines Plantation on Hilton Head—forever changing that barrier island—the decade of the 1970s was pivotal to the future success of the South Carolina coast.

  In Charleston, the historic tenure of Mayor Joe Riley began in 1975, continuing to this day as of this writing. The Irish American would break precedents and forge key alliances, reviving not only the local economies but tamping down age-old racial tensions. Beginning with downtown’s Charleston Place, Riley embarked on a series of high-profile public works projects to reinvigorate the then-moribund Charleston historic area. King Street would soon follow. In the years 1970-1976, tourism in the Holy City would increase 60 percent.

  The coast’s combination of beautiful scenery and cheap labor proved irresistible to the movie and TV industry, which began filming many shows and films in the area in the 1970s, and continue to do so to this day.

  Wilmington, North Carolina, remains a key movie location, often calling itself “Hollywood East.” Some of the 300 feature films made there include Blue Velvet, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Enchanted, Weekend at Bernies, and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Beaufort, South Carolina, would also emerge from its stately slumber as the star of several popular films, such as The Great Santini and The Big Chill.

  Of course, Myrtle Beach had been a leisure getaway for generations. But with the 1980s and the building of the Barefoot Landing retail/lodging development—followed by many others like it—the Grand Strand entered the first tier of American tourist destinations, where it remains.

  Charleston received its first major challenge since the Civil War in 1989 when Hurricane Hugo slammed into the South Carolina coast just above Charleston. The Holy City, including many of its most historic locations, was massively damaged, with hardly a tree left standing. However, in a testament to the toughness beneath Charleston’s genteel veneer, the city not only rebounded but came back stronger. In perhaps typically mercantile fashion, Charlestonians used the devastation of Hugo as a reason to introduce a new round of residential construction to the entire area, particularly the surrounding islands.

  Government and Economy

  GOVERNMENT

  For many decades, the South was completely dominated by the Democratic Party. Originally the party of slavery and segregation, the Democratic Party began attracting Southern African American voters in the 1930s with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The allegiance of black voters was further cemented in the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations.

  The region would remain solidly Democratic until a backlash against the civil rights movement of the 1960s drove many white Southerners, ironically enough, into the party of Lincoln, the Republicans. This added racial element, so confounding to Americans from other parts of the country, remains just as potent today.

  The default mode in the South is that white voters are massively Republican, and black voters massively Democratic. Since South Carolina is 69 percent white, doing the math translates to an overwhelming Republican dominance in the state. The GOP currently controls the governor’s mansion and both houses of the state legislature, and Republican Senator John McCain easily won the Palmetto State’s electoral votes in the 2008 presidential election.

  North Carolina is a very different story, at least on paper. It has a new Democratic governor, and both houses of its legislature are controlled by Democrats. In 2008, in a development that stunned many political observers, Democrat Barack Obama prevailed in the s
tate over John McCain.

  However, North Carolina’s progressivism is relative, and the state is still quite conservative compared to other areas of the country. Democrats in the state are often quite different from their counterparts in more liberal areas of the United States.

  Similarly, don’t make the mistake of assuming that local African Americans are particularly liberal because of their voting habits. Deeply religious and traditional in background and upbringing, African Americans in the Carolinas are among the most socially conservative people in the region, even if their choice of political party does not always reflect that.

  ECONOMY

  Even before the recent economic downturn, the coastal Carolinas had experienced a century’s worth of profound changes in economy and business. The rice crop moved offshore in the late 1800s and the center of the cotton trade moved to the Gulf states in the early 1900s. That left timber as the main cash crop all up and down the coast, specifically huge pine tree farms to feed the pulp and paper business.

  For most of the 20th century, the largest employers along the coast were massive, sulfur-smelling paper mills, which had as big an effect on the local environment as on its economy. But even that’s changing, as Asian competition is driving paper companies to sell off their tracts for real estate development—not necessarily a more welcome scenario from an environmental perspective.

  Since World War II, the U.S. Department of Defense has been a major employer and economic driver in the entire South. Despite the closing of the Charleston Naval Yard in the mid-1990s, the grounds now host the East Coast headquarters of SPAWAR (Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center), which provides high-tech engineering solutions for the Navy. Charleston also retains a large military presence in the Charleston Air Force Base near North Charleston, which hosts two airlift wings and employs about 6,000.