75 years later, Augusta struggles with "Tobacco Road"

<p>Erskine Caldwell's "Tobacco Road" is considered an American classic. But in Augusta, the famous novel's setting and the region that inspired his most significant works, there's nothing honoring or commemorating him even 75 years after the book was published.</p><p>That's because the book, hailed as a protest of the capitalistic and political systems during the Great Depression, made Tobacco Road synonymous with rural squalor.</p><p>Caldwell wrote "Southern gothic" books that sold over 80 million copies in 43 languages.</p><p>Since he died in 1987, the University of Georgia Press reissued 11 of his works. Moreland, Ga., in Coweta County, moved the house where he was born to the town square and turned it into a museum filled with Caldwell's books and personal belongings. In 2000, Mr. Caldwell was voted unanimously into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.</p><p>But Augusta hasn't joined in the trend in commemorating him, and Augusta State University history professor Wayne Mixon, who has written about Caldwell and the South, says it's because of Tobacco Road.</p><p>The 1932 novel's protagonist, Jeeter Lester, is the patriarch of an ignorant, sexually depraved family whose extreme poverty has reduced them to near animals.</p><p>"When we spoke of the poorest, or the most hopeless, or even the morally reprehensible among us, we said, 'They might as well be living on Tobacco Road,'" said novelist Lewis Nordan, who grew up in the Mississippi Delta in the 1940s.</p><p>Set in south Richmond County, the story covers seven days leading up to the deaths of Jeeter and his wife, Ada. There's a series of disturbing episodes, including one in which Jeeter's teenage son and his wife fatally run over a black man.</p><p>Augustans came to resent what they perceived as mocking caricatures of Southerners, and Caldwell was painted as a traitor.</p><p>"The general consensus around here was that he wrote dirty books," said Augusta historian Ed Cashin.</p><p>The backlash against Tobacco Road started after Arkansas playwright Jack Kirkland adapted the book into a play in 1933. With 3,182 performances in seven years, it set a record in its day as the longest-running Broadway play.</p><p>Augusta officials tried unsuccessfully to keep the play out and Georgia Gov. Eugene Talmadge commended the mayor of Chicago when his city banned it on obscenity grounds.</p><p>In the late 1960s, the Augusta-Richmond County Planning Commission considered renaming Tobacco Road because of the stigma. And in the mid-1990s, the mayor of Moreland tried to shut down The Erskine Caldwell Birthplace and Museum, arguing in part that the author wasn't someone who should be honored. The effort failed.</p><p>"His relationship with the South was generally tense," museum Director Winston Skinner said. "He wrote about poor people. He wrote about people who were depraved. He wrote about people that maybe genteel Southerners didn't want to talk about."</p><p>Mixon says that those critical of Tobacco Road for its portrayal of poor whites miss the point, which was a cry for help for those overcome by their environment in the throes of the Depression.</p><p>"Caldwell's intent was to expose wrong so it could be made right, but at the same time, he was a very gifted artist," he said. "It's something that Augusta should be proud of, instead of ashamed of."</p><p>___</p><p>HASH(0x1cdcc48)</p>

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