In the South, whether one was black or white, death was a common and important part of the region's self-conception, its """"""""mind,"""""""" in writer W.J. Cash's words, since the death of young and old alike was ever present. What happened, then, when public health policy, which assumed that dying was bad except in old age or on a battlefield, infiltrated the South? What happened to the centrality of death and the rituals used to manage the chaos associated with it in a region that witnessed a tremendous economic and social transformation during the interwar era? My new book project, """"""""Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent"""""""": The Management of Death and the Evolution of Public Health Policy in the South, 1918-1945, under option by the University of Illinois Press, is a study of the management of death and other public health issues and how that management influenced regional power and politics. It is also a study of what happened when new public health policies levied by the New Deal and the military mobilization for World War II helped transform a region considered at the time to be the nation's number one economic and health problem. I will use an interdisciplinary approach that marries together history, cultural anthropology, and folklore and apply this approach to public health policy. The significance of my work lies in the latter application of lessons learned in the South by the Federal Government and private foundations to post-World War II nation-building in the emergent Third World.
Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: The Management of Death and the Evolution of Public Health Policy in the South, 1918-1945 is significant to public health in two ways. First, the way we die has much to tell us about how we live, and these issues must be placed in historical context to be adequately understood. Second, the strategies forged in the South during the interwar era by the Federal Government and by private health organizations were applied as global policy when the United States expanded its public health efforts to the emergent Third World after World War II.
