Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2023/Fall/Section18/William McAlister

1.    Biography

1. Ned Harvin, more commonly known as William McAlister, lived in Columbia, South Carolina in the 1920s with his wife, Ruth McAlister, and four young children.
2. Early Life and Education: The beginning of his education took place in a one-room schoolhouse in the sandhills. Several years later, his Uncle Ben took him to study with Professor A. R. Banks and, after one year, to university. He attended college at University of South Carolina where he focused on playing football and wrestling.
3. Occupations: McAlister found work providing wreck service for those who called McAlister for help with properties that were damaged by weather, accidents, or crime. Some of the services he carried out included saving people stranded in a flood due to a boat motor malfunction, saving farm animals stuck in weather damaged areas, and removing dead victims’ bodies from post-murder crime scenes. He often worked with black sharecroppers who worked under Uncle Ben on his plantation. During his service trips, McAlister would often get into fights with them and resort to beating them under the direction of Uncle Ben, although McAlister expressed having a “warm place in [his] heart” for the men he worked with. According to McAlister, Uncle Ben would threaten that “if he ever let a [slur] whip [McAlister], he’d give [McAlister] another one if he heard about it.” Along with working as a wreck servicer, McAlister spent his time hunting and fishing on Uncle Ben’s plantation, racing cars, and racing boats.
4. Beliefs: McAlister and his family were staunch Presbyterians, following under the preaching of the deacon of his Church for several decades. He attributes his financial success with his storeroom, along with buying and selling his properties, with the honesty he learned from Presbyterianism. McAlister valued his membership in the Presbyterian church and said that the community made him more financially knowledgeable. His strict religious beliefs also heavily influenced his opinions on the increasing rate of crime in the US. In a conversation he had with Ruth, he strongly disagrees with her about the fact that capital punishment for crime is immoral. He believes in the use of capital punishment and that people should see them often as it “teaches a valuable lesson”. He questions what the US would do without it if it doesn’t control crime.
5. Late Life and Death: He made a living selling his old belongings to furnish his house nearing his retirement. His sense of hearing and sight declined with age and with his use of loud machinery, preventing him from continuing to pursue his passion for adventure and connecting with people in his community. His life ended a day after a serious accident where he was run over by a mail train and his left leg was dismembered.

2.    Social Context

1. Rise of Crime during the Great Depression: With the US suffering from poverty and unemployment, many Americans took to illegal ways of procuring money such as bootlegging, robbing banks, and loansharking. The passage of the 18^th Amendment and the introduction of Prohibition in 1920 led to the rise of organized crime and mafias in the US. Rivalry between opposing organizations led to violent activities like drug trafficking, prostitution, gambling, and often murder. Due to the increase in crime, the US spent its already limited funding on prisons. To solve this, the US doubled down on preventing crime by utilizing Capital Punishment. Although tensions increased between whether they were moral or immoral through Abolitionism, death sentences became a common punishment, particularly in more urban areas. Fortunately, during the Progressive Era, people fought to prevent the prevalent use of it. According to “Abolition and Reinstatement of Capital Punishment during the Progressive Era and Early 20th Century”, speculation concerning what groups had the most impact in the fight for the reduction of its use remains as evident in the quote, “While some view these laws as resulting from the demands of the urban working class, others have found that the middle class were largely responsible for generating these reforms.”
2. Presbyterianism during the Great Depression: Presbyterian churches during the Great Depression were not only places of worship where people found solace in religious kinship, but areas to create reform. Throughout Prohibition, Presbyterians would see the use of alcohol as a method of bending minds away from “Christ’s saving grace”. As mentioned in Family Dynamics and the Great Revival: Religious Conversion in the South Carolina Piedmont, one reverend even became an “enthusiastic proponent of the revival and described his own transformation in terms resonant of awakened sinners.” Within the family, the emergence of strict Christian values simultaneously strengthened the traditional nuclear family and caused conflicts within it. One sect of Presbyterianism, Evangelicalism, undermined patriarchal households and rejected a value system based on wealth and status. Instead, it focused on dependence and humility as an honorable value, leading to many “dependents” in American families to disrupt the typical family dynamic.

3. Footnotes

2. “Did He Love Adventure?” Interview by Maddie T Jones, date March 9, 1939, Folder 1044 Federal Writers’ Project papers #3709, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
3. Johnson, George EQ. “Let’s Go to War on Crime!” Evening Star. October 13, 1935.
4. Galliher, John F., Gregory Ray, and Brent Cook. “Abolition and Reinstatement of Capital Punishment during the Progressive Era and Early 20th Century.” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1973-) 83, no. 3 (1992): 538–76.
5. Moore, Peter N. “Family Dynamics and the Great Revival: Religious Conversion in the South Carolina Piedmont.” The Journal of Southern History 70, no. 1 (2004): 35–62.

4.   References

Moore, Peter N. “Family Dynamics and the Great Revival: Religious Conversion in the South Carolina Piedmont.” The Journal of Southern History 70, no. 1 (2004): 35–62. https://doi.org/10.2307/27648311.

Ross, Arthur M. “The Negro Worker in the Depression.” Social Forces 18, no. 4 (1940): 550–59.https://doi.org/10.2307/2570633.

Galliher, John F., Gregory Ray, and Brent Cook. “Abolition and Reinstatement of Capital Punishment during the Progressive Era and Early 20th Century.” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1973-) 83, no. 3 (1992): 538–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/1143838.

Johnson, George EQ. “Let’s Go to War on Crime!” Evening Star. October 13, 1935. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1935-10-13/ed-1/seq-82/

“Volume 42.” The Pickens Sentinel. March 20, 1913. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn93067671/1913-03-20/ed-1/seq-1/