The Southern Studies Project: A Paragraph in the History of American Geography

THE SOUTHERN STUDIES PROJECT: A PARAGRAPH IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY Preston E. James" Marvin Mikesell has remarked that, viewed in retrospect, "the landscape of American geography may seem to be littered with the ruins of abandoned tasks." (1) But among these ruins there were always new projects springing up. Mikesell observed that ". . . the writings of geographers . . . reveal sporadic excitements that can only be explained by the fickleness of human nature. We embrace new ideas, utilize them for awhile, and then cast them aside. And the ideas thus neglected may never have been disproved by objective standards. They may simply have been discarded because they were no longer fashionable." We have all seen fads come and go, even during the past decade. Whatever happened to "central place" studies? Is the enthusiasm for studies of environmental perception being maintained so that the profession might actually formulate some concepts of wide validity? Mikesell was discussing the waning of interest in sequent occupance studies which replaced studies of environmental influence during the 1920's and 1930's. Whatever happened to the proposal that urban centers might be classified on the basis of the proportion of total urban area occupied by the several functions for the performance of which cities came into existence? Perhaps you never knew that such a proposal had been made, and its application demonstrated. Or what about the proposal by Stanley D. Dodge that studies of population could be related to a statistically normal growth curve, a portion of a sine curve, and that counties in the United States could be classified according to the position each one had reached on this curve? (2) This paper tells the story of one such project which was developed with considerable enthusiasm in the late 1930's, and which became a war casualty in 1941. It was called "The Southern Studies Project" when it was developed under the auspices of the Committee on Geographic Research of the National Research Council and the Association of American Geographers. First, permit me to sketch briefly some background regarding the nature of geographic research in the 1930's. American geographers of that period held in common a strong tradition of field study. All the major graduate departments required field training as an essential part •Dr. James is Maxwell Professor Emeritus of geography at Syracuse University and adjunct professor of geography at Florida Atlantic University. This paper was accepted for publication in December 1973. 2 Southeastern Geographer of programs of advanced study, and most dissertations and theses involved the identification of geographical problems in the field, and the search for answers to such problems on the basis of field observation. It has been pointed out that this emphasis on observation out-of-doors was derived legitimately from the early surveys of the West, involving such persons as Ferdinand V. Hayden, Clarence King, George M. Wheeler, Grove Karl Gilbert, and John Wesley Powell. William Morris Davis, the father of professional geography in the United States, learned from his teacher, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, how to identify problems of a geographic nature, how to make and record the necessary observations , how to make use of the multiple hypotheses in the search for acceptable explanations, and how to communicate the results. When the first separate graduate department of geography in the United States was established in Chicago in 1903 under the chairmanship of Rollin D Salisbury, training in field methods was an essential part of the program. At the annual meetings of the Association of American Geographers there were almost always special sessions devoted to round-table discussions of field methods. A very important part of the development of geographical ideas and procedures in the 1920's and 1930's was played by annual spring field conferences. In every May between 1923 and 1938, conferences lasting three or four days were held in different parts of the Middle West. They were attended by ten to twenty geographers, mostly from universities of the Middle West, who came together to discuss the objectives and procedures of geographic research in the field, and who actually tried out the various proposals in small study areas. The last conference, held in 1938, was brought together in...