Although most historians would probably consider the South a major problem throughout the century and a half of American history from the 1820s to the 1970s, the Problem South that Natalie J. Ring examines seems to have lasted a mere fifty years, from 1880 to 1930. Besides being the title of her book, “The Problem South” is the name she gives to the devastating critique of the South that was formulated by reformers in the South as well as in the non-South at the turn of the twentieth century. The chronic backwardness of the southern region, with its extensive poverty, illiteracy, and disease, as well as its structural economic and racial problems, threatened not only the region's future, but also, so Ring argues, the entire nation's emergence as a modern liberal state. If it can be said that the slave South threatened the nation in the nineteenth century, then the “Problem South” imperiled it again in the twentieth.

In the book's first chapter, Natalie Ring reminds readers that the uncovering of the region's deteriorating social and economic conditions originated in the South itself with the writings of Walter Hines Page, George W. Cable, Edgar Gardner Murphy and others in the 1880s and 1890s. But her main contention is that their critique soon became national in scope and personnel. And this broader discussion of what was wrong and what could be done about it is the focus of the rest of her study.

The kinds of people who were involved were Progressives – that is, reformers and modernizers – who wanted to improve the dreadful social and economic conditions in the South and forge a modern, “civilized” nation-state. And for the most part they were professionals: academics (especially social scientists), journalists, clergymen, lawyers. But some were wealthy philanthropists like the Rockefellers, who were willing to fund campaigns against southern disease and illiteracy, or officials in the US Department of Agriculture who encouraged experiments in the South with small farms and scientific methods, a very different approach from the existing plantation system, with its overproduction and its indebted, oppressed tenants. Since Ring's emphasis is on the discourse, the rhetoric, of “The Problem South,” she is less concerned with the organization and process of reform, or even its outcome. In other words, this is not a study of a movement, but of an idea – the South as an urgent national problem.

The South's problem was its backwardness (indeed, the “Backward South” or the “Primitive South” might be a better term than “Problem South”) and, in Ring's view, it consisted of four issues, or questions, with an entire chapter devoted to each of them. They are “The Menace of the Diseased South,” “The White Plague of Cotton,” “The Poor White Problem as the ‘New Race Question’,” and “The ‘Race Problem’ and the Fiction of the Color Line.” These problems were very serious and the presence of all of them in the South at the same time distinguished it from the rest of the country. Yet each of these problems also occurred elsewhere in the world, so that reformers concerned about the South's lack of social progress and economic development looked abroad for useful comparisons and suggestions that might help them understand and uplift the South. The racial problem in both its poor-white and its black dimensions was to be found in European colonies in Africa and in American rule in the Philippines, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, southern diseases, especially tropical ones like malaria, were known in other places, as was cotton cultivation which was extensive in China, Japan and India, and useful lessons could probably be learned from them.

Natalie Ring's discussion of the critique and agenda of the “Problem South” reformers is insightful and informative. But particularly innovative is her expansion of the scope of her study beyond the borders of the United States, so as to demonstrate that the problems of the South were not unique and that the reformers themselves were very aware of transnational connections and comparisons. More discussion of this international dimension of the Progressives' mission would have confirmed this book as a fresh and significant contribution.

Despite what the author has achieved in pointing out the national and international aspects of the “Problem South” campaign, the study ends on a very inconclusive note. Instead of a final chapter assessing the “Problem South” project in some way, or perhaps reporting whether the South today is still a national problem, there is just a very brief, anticlimactic Epilogue. Its title, “The Enduring Paradox of the South,” reiterates the familiar characterization of the southern states as a region caught forever on the horns of an unresolvable dilemma between progress and poverty, between a New South and the Old South. This paradox would have continued to be an accurate description if the white South had been left alone to rid the region of its backwardness. But just three decades after 1930, the terminal date of Ring's study, “the Nation's No. 1 economic problem” was being dismantled by President Roosevelt's New Deal and World War II initiatives in the South, and its segregated racial system was under attack from a powerful civil rights insurgency, eventually abetted by federal legislation (133). The New South was at last emerging, though it had required considerable help from the federal government, far more than the earlier Progressive reformers had ever imagined.