In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

TWO AMERICAN SOUTHS: THE PAST AND THE FUTURE Merle C. Prunty* The charge to me from our program chairman, some months ago, was to examine the South on the occasion of the Bicentennial year, and to present my views of what I found. The charge was flattering in its structure but alarming in its latitude. Some 300 years of Europeans and Africans on the land of the South is too much for one evening and for this man—so I've reduced it to what I hope is a manageable dimension . I am confining my observations on the South's past largely to conditions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but I shall try to give more attention to both the remarkable changes of recent years and the outlook for the region in the decades ahead. My interest in the South started during undergraduate days in the 1930s at the University of Missouri. There I became a student under a master teacher named Sam T. Bratton, a Chicago Ph.D. whose dissertation had examined the St. Francis basin on the Mississippi alluvial floodplain in Missouri's panhandle. Bratton put me in the field in the panhandle, which was totally new to me and about as "Southern " an area as there is. The experience not only made a vivid impression but initiated a long-term interest in the South. Essentially, what one observed in the 1930s was the South of the sharecrop-share tenancy era that had developed in the 1870s and 1880s. The prevailing traits of the region had obtained institutional qualities through the post Civil War decades, during which they had developed. In the 1930s the seeds of the massive changes in the next four decades could be sensed, but at that time they were only seeds, no more. What kind of a South did we have? Several key traits stood out. The Southerner of the 1930s had a highly developed sense of place in both a local and a regional context. This was not simply a trait of the 30s, but a long-standing one. The Southerners lived in small towns * Keynote address delivered during the opening session of a joint meeting of the Southeastern and the Middle Atlantic Divisions of the Association of American Geographers in Fredericksburg, Virginia, 21 November, 1976. Dr. Prunty is Alumni Foundation Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia in Athens, Ga. 30602. Southeastern Geographer or rural communities, and these they knew intimately. They knew the soils, the forests and streams, the roads, and the farmsteads. They knew not only the families that comprised their populace, but also the ancestry and marital interconnections of these families. By the 1930s the mobility of the population remained quite restricted since few southern roads were paved and many families did not own automobiles . The restricted range of movements heightened the level of detail, the intimacy, with which the home area was known. A trip to a regional center such as Charlotte or Atlanta or Memphis could be the subject of innumerable conversations for years to follow, but scores of thousands never travelled more than a few miles from home. Within the community, however, weekly trips to the nearest small market service center were common. Mule-drawn wagons and old cars poured into the little towns by the scores and even hundreds on Saturdays and, weather permitting, also during the winters when there was little farm work to do. Country folk had—by custom and convention— certain areas where they gathered. Usually these were certain street intersections, or whole blocks in the business district. Here they assembled in large knots and visited. They were in their town, in their community , and it was all "home" to them. These people also had a strong sense of person, of the individual. When they met on sidewalks, or in small stores, this trait was especially noticeable as they consistently greeted one another. To fail to do so was a slight, an offense that cast some doubt on the nature of one's upbringing. The sense of person was strong despite the established socioeconomic hierarchy. The hierarchy was well understood. Everyone knew his and everyone else's place...

pdf

Share