Air conditioning make the South more comfortable, but less friendly

by Joe Tarr

It was July 1953, and the movie stars were in town to promote the new film So This Is Love, based on the life of opera star and former Knoxvillian Grace Moore.

It was to be an all-out gala, with stars Kathryn Grayson, Merv Griffin, and Joan Weldon, as well as Gov. Frank Clement on hand for the premier at the Tennessee Theatre.

And it was damn hot. The mercury that day reached 94 and never dropped below 79. It had been hotter than normal that summer.

David Harkness remembers it well, because he met Merv Griffin at the airport and drove him to his room at the Farragut Hotel. There was only one air-conditioned hotel at the time, the Andrew Johnson, and the sponsors of the event didn't book the stars there.

"I took him up to his room and it was as hot as the middle of the Sahara Desert," Harkness says. "I don't know how the man stood it, frankly. It was really awful."

The movie stars had no choice but to endure the sweltering humidity that the rest of the South had always managed to live with.

Such heroics are no longer necessary. It still gets hot, of course, but most people need only cope during the time spent walking from buildings to cars.

Life is certainly more comfortable in the age of air conditioning. But some wonder whether Southerners haven't been softened by the cool air continuously bathing them—and in the process lost some of their culture and identity.

"It has a strong effect. It disconnects you with what's outside. That's one of the reasons I was hesitant to get it," says Bill Murrah, community economic development specialist with Knoxville's Legal Aid Society. "When you've just got the windows and doors open, you're just sort of acclimated. You can hear outside, you can hear the kids, you can see what's happening on the street.

"But on the other hand, it's so humid here. We use the darn thing."

Drive down any residential street any summer night, and you will hear the gentle lull of hundreds of AC units, pumping air over refrigeration coils, pulling the moisture out of it, and removing impurities to create a climate of bliss in each dwelling.

You can escape sweltering heat just about anywhere—a movie theater, the local pub, the mall, drug stores, the bus, and work. Even most working poor can probably scrap together the $220 it costs for a small window unit; or get a used one cheaper at a pawn shop.

It has affected nearly every aspect of Southern life—from work hours to architecture, argues Raymond Arsenault, a history professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Arsenault's 1984 essay "End of the Long Hot Summer" was the first extensive look at how AC has changed the South.

The transition to air conditioning took nearly a century, but it is now complete.

A young engineer named Willis Haviland Carrier invented the air conditioner in 1902 for a Brooklyn printing press where high humidity was savaging its color printing operation.

The acknowledged "Father of Air Conditioning," Carrier refined his technology over the next 50 years, steadily winning converts.

Industries that needed to control humidity and keep their large machinery cool were the first buy it. In the South, that included textile mills and tobacco companies, according to Arsenault.

In the 1920s and '30s, air conditioning started to be used for personal comfort. Movie theaters were among the first to adapt the systems, and places like the Tennessee Theatre advertised with snow-covered logos. The Federal Government began using AC in the early '30s and the technology has since been blamed for the exploding federal budget and bureaucracy.

"Until [AC] became universal in Washington after World War II, Congress habitually closed shop around the end of June and did not reopen until the following January," wrote columnist Russell Baker in the New Yorker. "Six months of every year, the nation enjoyed a respite from the promulgation of more laws, the depredations of lobbyists, the hatching of new schemes for Federal expansion, and of course, the cost of running a government at full blast. Once air conditioning arrived, Congress had twice as much time to exercise its skill at regulating and plucking the population." (Baker blamed most of all Southern legislators, who no longer felt the need to perspire into their juleps under magnolia and catalpa and instead "stayed crisp as lettuce in the cool splendor of the Capitol.")

Strangely enough, it would take the South longer to embrace the new technology at home, according to Arsenault. Hospitals were steadfast against them, in part because early versions of the technology had spread epidemics throughout them.

Stores, hotels, businesses, and other government offices didn't begin to install them until the early '50s. But once they started, AC became common place. At the same time, affordable window units and factory-installed car models hit the market, followed shortly by central air for homes. More and more people started using AC and by 1970, half of all Southern households had it.

According to the 1993 U.S. Census Bureau, 89 percent of all Southern homes have some form of air conditioning; as do 68 percent of the nation's. And 98 percent of all new homes in the South are built with central air, according to the Air Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration News.

The coolness has benefited the South in many ways. It has improved health and brought jobs.

"One of the things it's done across the South is make the whole idea of growth in the Sun Belt more palatable," says Ann Bennett, a senior planner who works on historic preservation with the Metropolitan Planning Commission.

"If you were somebody considering a location for a manufacturing plant in 1930 in August, you'd be less likely to move to Knoxville than you would in 1980 and you knew you'd have an air conditioned plant and your executives would live in air conditioned homes," she says.

Arsenault argues that the effect on the South has been overwhelming, eroding several regional traditions, not all of them positive: cultural isolation, agrarianism, poverty, romanticism, historical consciousness, an orientation toward nontechnology, folk culture, a preoccupation with kinship, neighborliness, a strong sense of place, and a relatively slow pace of life.

"As the Southern climate has been artificially tamed, pastoralism has been replaced by technological determinism. In escaping the heat and humidity, Southerners have weakened the bond between humanity and the natural environment. In the process, they have lost some of what made them interesting and distinctive," he writes.

Distinctive Southern architecture with features designed for coolness—high ceilings, thin walls, long breezeways, floors raised off the ground, steep pitched roofs vented top to bottom, open porches, transoms above bedroom doors, massive windows, shade trees—have become obsolete, Arsenault says.

Knoxville architect Bob Parrott says air conditioning gave rise to the "international" style of architecture—grid-like high-rises covered with glass that doesn't open (like the Plaza Tower and Riverview Tower). It also may have contributed to the death of downtowns, he says.

"We could not have these malls we have, they could not be tolerated without air conditioning," Parrott says. "Maybe our downtown wouldn't have died so quickly. But the suburban mall would be totally different."

Parrott rattles off several changes AC contributed to, ranging from the design of schools to the phasing out of "fly windows"—those triangular vents at the front of cars. "You could open those wonderful little vent windows and not get blown away. I miss those," Parrott says.

What people regret most about AC is how (combined with television) it has eroded Southern communities.

"Back then, people used to sit out on the porch. Air conditioning along with TV has really brought people inside," says Bob Webb, a member of the board of directors of the Bijou Theatre. "I'm not advocating a return to the old way, but I think our country lost something when we quit sitting out on the porch and talking to our neighbors."

"The way you get to know people and interact with them is you sit outside, people walk by, you share a glass of lemonade, and you get to know each other better," Bennett says. "People got out of the habit of sitting out on the front porch."

Bennett, who grew up in the much-more-torrid Oklahoma, says she wouldn't chuck her AC. "When the days were hot and humid, you couldn't comfortably or even safely be outside until about 5 or even 7," she says. "I remember what it was like to live without air conditioning, and we used to do everything we could to stay cool."

Shops would close down from 1 until about 4 p.m. Many took vacations in August to "escape the heat," she says.

In Knoxville, the nearby Smoky Mountains were a popular refuge, and the Knoxville News-Sentinel published the much cooler temperature on top of Mount LeConte every day.

Harkness remembers UT students languishing in the summer classrooms and the library and large metal fans that merely stirred up the muggy, hot air.

There are still a smattering of homes and cars without air conditioning. Not everyone can afford it; not everyone likes it.

The Bijou Theater is only now installing AC. Lack of it had in recent years meant the theater couldn't operate during the summer months, although there were a few attempts. At a Ramones' show there in the early '90s, many fans abandoned their seats and listened to the music out on the sidewalk instead.

And, of course, Knoxville isn't the Deep South. It doesn't have the oppressive summers of Georgia, Florida, Texas, or Alabama—the place Murrah grew up.

That was one reason, when he moved to Knoxville 24 years ago, Murrah didn't get air conditioning in his home. He used a more primitive form of technology—the attic fan—which with the flip of a switch, "Whoosh, any air in the house, it's gone."

Reluctantly, he decided to update two years ago with a central heat and air unit.

"It sounds like I'm bemoaning this modern technology. I just think we have to fight against its negative aspects and not get pulled away into these little boxes," Murrah says. "We have to make sure we're still connected out there in the common spaces."