How did laborers in the American South "beat the heat" before the invention of air conditioning?

'Staying cool' is a question that pops up now and then, but doing a scan through the old threads, I found it weird that we don't have any really solid threads which specifically deal with the American South! Well, fortunately, I was able to dig up some information to tackle it with. Interestingly though, the topic of staying cool in the pre-A/C days, as far as the American South goes, is one that is not particularly well covered in the academic literature, and the limited amount of material is well expressed in the words of Rayomond Arsenault. Noting that this is a pretty glaring omission, given the not insignificant role it played in the transformation of the South, he writes:

This scholarly neglect is surprising because it goes against the grain of common sense and popular culture. Ask any southerner over thirty years of age to explain why the South has changed in recent decades, and he may begin with the civil rights movement or industrialization. But sooner or later he will come around to the subject of air conditioning. For better or worse, he will tell you, the air conditioner has changed the nature of southern life.

That being said, while the full impact of modern air conditioners is a 20th century phenomenon, attempts at technological solutions to the issue of the South's climate date into the antebellum period, going back as least as early as John Gorrie's attempts to create a cooling system in the 1830s. A doctor with the USMC in Florida, he spent many years attempting to work on a more effective means of cooling down patient wards for the sick men in his care. His first attempt, both simple and of marginal results, involved hanging buckets of ice from the ceiling and allowing the cooled air that flowed over the ice circulate down through the room. Attempts to improve on his first attempts would eventually result in using steam-driven compressors to improve circulation of the air, and a patent for an artificial ice maker in 1851. His ideas were a step towards modern A/C, but they never took hold in his lifetime. By the 1880s though, at least the very wealthy were able to use a fairly similar system to what Gorrie had been working towards, with Garfield's Whitehouse bedroom consuming over 400 pounds an hour.

Steam-power was still necessary to circulate the air, however, which of course was a severe limitation on access to such a system, even if you could find a large quantity of ice. The invention of the electric-fan in the early 1880s extended the 'miracle' of air flow to the middle class though, and by the turn of the century, respectable establishments in southern cities would boast of them, and the it was a "a badge of middle-class respectability" for the city-dwelling family. What of the urban poor, and those in the rural, unelectrified regions? If you wanted airflow, you were going to have to create it the old fashioned way, with a hand fan.

Obviously though, walking around with a fan all day isn't that feasible, especially if you have to do, you know, other things. As such, there are many different ways which the South attempted to 'beat the heat', in terms of dress, architecture, and behavior.

The design of southern houses, from the palatial plantation home down to the rural cabin, was done with the heat in mind. The long, shaded verandas weren't simply a statement of style, but a place to 'hang out' in relative comfort when the house was too oppressive - the tradition of 'porch-sitting' in the early evening, while the arrangement, and wide dimension of hallways was an "in ingenious conspiracy of passive cooling and cross-ventilation". Arsenault lists a large number of other design innovations, found in all classes of home, which were all intended to help reduce the temperature indoors, which I'll simply borrow here:

high ceilings, thin walls, long breezeways, floors raised three or more feet off the ground, steeply pitched roofs vented from top to bottom, open porches, broad eaves that blocked the slanting sun, massive doors and windows that sometimes stretched from floor to ceiling, louvered jalousies, transoms placed above bedroom doors, dormers, groves of shade trees blanketing the southern exposure, houses situated to capture prevailing breezes,

Beyond the home, there were many ways to try and stay cool as well. For the youth at least, able to do so in the middle of the day, swimming was quite a popular pastime to escape the midday heat. For the working man, a midday nap under a shady tree could be a welcome break from plowing, and healthy doses of iced-tea and cold water - or a somewhat chilled beer (Sidenote: My father has fond memories of working as a teen in late '60s Alabama and subsisting on lukewarm Schlitz during the day) - were used by just about everyone. When to work, and when to simply move about, was dictated by the heat patterns of the day, and in many towns, stores would close during the middle of the day because no one would choose to go shopping at that time! In-door entertainment, such as theaters, would simply close for the whole summer, so early attempts at out-door projection cropped up in the 20s and 30s, although the 'Drive Through" wouldn't take off until the post-war era.

Style of dress also revolved around the weather. Clothing made of loose and/or light material such as overalls, and of course seersucker, as strong an image of southern culture as any, also were adopted, and quite widespread in wear for the hot, summer months. Material and manner of dress of course was also a way to communicate class and style, and the South was a society where those meant a lot. As Charles Reagan Wilson notes in his introduction to Vol. 4 of the New Encyclopedia of the South:

In fact, southerners have always ‘‘put on’’ a southern identity. Wearing khaki pants or overalls was a revealing fashion statement but also a prime image of social class in the rural South. Today, wearing a seersucker suit evokes a South of small-town courthouse lawyers on sweltering summer days.

The turn of the century was also the first time that modern A/C infiltrated into the American South. While a fan, on its own, could improve airflow, it of course didn't noticeably cool the air without ice, nor deal with the humidity, the bane of the Southern summer. The first modern A/C unit debuted in Brooklyn, in 1902, but it took off quickest to the south of NYC, where the name "air conditioning" itself was attached to the machine. Early machines were by no means accessible to the average household, or even most wealthy, for that matter, but conversely, this meant that some of the first beneficiaries were in fact the working class, with some of the earliest machines first installed in large southern factories, especially textile mills and tobacco warehouses, where the humidity was considered a significant threat to the merchandise. The side benefit, of course, was the ability to labor in in a cool environment for the workers themselves. It was hardly an immediate adaption though, and it would be many decades before most factories would, in fact, be cooled.

As for domestic use though, it would of course be even longer. Only a mere handful of non-industrial establishments boasted of A/C in the South before the mid-1920s - mostly hotels lobbies (rooms would not have their own units for many more decades) - with it being quite the attraction in-of-itself. Dallas' Palace Theater installed a system in 1924, one of the first theaters in the South to do so, and used it as a major selling point. Other theaters followed suit through the decade, allowing them to remain open through the summer, a season that had formerly closed them down. Improvements in A/C systems, reducing size and cost, as well as increasing performance, coincided with the slow expansion of the machines over the next few decades, but home use was slow to take hold. It wasn't until the 1930s that it was even feasible to have units which could be used in the home, and they were out of reach for all but the rich. Only in the 1950s, when window units went on the market, did modern home cooling come in reach of the none elite, and sales quickly took off. On 1955 only five percent of southern homes had A/C, while in a mere 5 years it was nearly 20 percent. By 1980, 73.2 percent of homes reported A/C units.

So anyways, this has turned into more a history of 'staying cool in the south' than simply a focus on the pre-AC days, but I read that whole paper, so gosh-darnit, I wasn't gonna keep that all to myself! The sum of it is though, that into the post-WWII period, Air Conditioning was a luxury that many in the south experienced only rarely, and those without it very much structured their lives around staying as cool as possible. This meant dressing in appropriate fabrics and styles, drinking cool liquids, and often, just staying in the shade at the hottest part of the day. When not working, families would gather to sit on the porch in the evening until the home was cool enough to inhabit again - an important part of the social life in many communities - and once inside, the very design of southern homes was intended to maximize the way in which air flowed about. It is an interesting coda that some 'old timers', and a few younger nostalgics too, see the rise of A/C to be in many ways a negative that destroyed the old way of southern life in the changes it wrought there.

Raymond Arsenault, "The End of the Long Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture" The Journal of Southern History, V. 50, N. 4 (Nov. 1984), pp. 597-628 (Also the author of "Cool Comfort" a book on A/C, but I do not have that so...)

New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture ed. Charles Reagan Wilson, University of North Carolina Press