User:Cjr100B/John Fleming (tobacco salesman)

The only comments made about the life of John Fleming were his own words demonstrating his pride in his accomplishments. This was evident in his interview for the Federal Writers' Project, which is now housed at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Southern Historical Collection. Through his successes and through his failures, he was content with how his life turned out.

Biography
John Fleming grew up in Milton, North Carolina. His father, F. Jasper Fleming, was a prestigious plantation owner just outside of the Raleigh city limits. After the Civil War, his family’s plantation was rendered useless, so they moved to Milton to pursue business in trade and merchants with Mrs. Fleming’s father, Jarvis Friou. While their family was in the mercantile business, Milton’s economy boomed.

John Fleming did not share much about his romantic relationships until his interview. In this way, the title “A Southern Gentleman” was fitting as “discretion was the mark of a gentleman.” However, after various affairs with women he met in Milton and in his travels over the years, he focused on his career again after his third marriage. He returned to travelling sales for a time, and he eventually ventured into the realm of real estate, where he lost all his money in the stock market crash of 1929.

Social issues
Many of the social issues that were common of interviewees of the Federal Writers' Project were also common themes in John Fleming’s life story. As was typical in that era, wealthy families enjoyed the luxury of sending their children to school. Many poorer families could not afford to send their children to school, either due to distance or associated costs or the need for the children to be working at home. This was, in fact, a visible part of the issue of social class, especially in the post-Civil War Reconstruction of the south. Families with more money were distinguished in their communities, and those who struggled financially only saw more trials when the Great Depression destroyed the American economy. This made a way for economic issues as well. Wealthy families became penniless in only a day and no longer stood out as the higher society, especially in small communities such as Milton.

Accessibility of education
The Fleming family heirs were successful plantation owners before the Civil War, so they saw no need for formal education. With the end of the Civil War, the family was forced to leave their luxurious plantation in Raleigh for the small town of Milton. Jasper Fleming, with very little education in business, jumped into the mercantile industry, desperate for a way to provide for his family. His son, John Fleming, followed his father’s new career by attending school as a young man. Even though the Fleming’s were not the upper class they were used to, “race in the South…has always overwhelmed class." John Fleming had the opportunity to attend school primarily because he was white. It would have been unheard of in the wake of the Civil War, for a black family to send their children to school, let alone the same school that even the lower class white children attended. Because his father’s business took off as Milton began to grow, John Fleming was expected to attend school, in part because he was white and also because of the upper social class the Fleming family was entering in the small town of Milton.

Issues of class
As the Fleming family became more successful, John Fleming gained experience working for the American Tobacco Company as a travelling salesman. As he traveled all over the continental United States, his lifestyle reflected his high ranking in the new socioeconomic class following the Civil War. While traveling, his employer gave him living expenses that allowed him to have a luxurious lifestyle as he visited New York City, Chicago, and other big business capitols of that era.

Economic issues
Some believed that “the slave South was a capitalist society and therefore the Civil War did not bring revolutionary social change,” but John Fleming was one individual who proved that very wrong. The drastic changes made to the southern economy following the war made it very apparent that their economy was based on slave labor, but they refused to accept that. With the confederate loss of the war, the south had to change how they did business. The Fleming family’s move to Milton and the mercantile business is just another example of how drastically the south had to adjust their economy following the Civil War. At that point “the South now [saw] very well that she [could] restore her prosperity only within the competition of an industrial system”.

Economic trials struck again when the stock market crashed in 1929. John Fleming had invested all of his life’s earnings, almost a quarter of a million dollars, in Floridian real estate. With the Depression, he lost everything, and he never recovered economically from that loss before his death in 1943.

Federal Writers’ Project
In 1935, as a part of the New Deal, the Works Progress Administration commissioned the Federal Writers' Project as a way to help unemployed writers following the Great Depression. The project employed over 6,600 historians, researchers, writers, journalists, and editors. The purpose was for them to go out and interview residents, and they recorded thousands of oral histories from average American citizens of different regions and counties of several states.

Issues of voice and power
While many interviewers recorded the meetings in the colloquial vernacular of their interviewees, Fleming was not one of those cases due to his education and social class standings. He was very formal in speaking with his interviewee, Beth Cannady, and he gave a very lengthy and seemingly objective overview of his life. The interviewer did focus most on his history of business and his romantic relationships because those were the most significant things about his life: business and pleasure.