The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880?1930

Introduction: Regional, National, and Global Designs

1 I introduction Regional, National, and Global Designs It is true that each section and state and county and township has its own problems—but the particular problems of the part are the general problems of the whole; and the nation, as a nation, is interested in the administration and concerns of the most insignificant members of the body politic. —andrew sledd There exists among us by ordinary—both North and South—a profound conviction that the South is another land, sharply differentiated from the rest of the American nation, and exhibiting within itself remarkable homogeneity. . . . The peculiar history of the South has so greatly modified it from the general American norm that, when viewed as a whole, it decisively justifies the notion that the country is—not quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it. —w. j. cash n 1920 Henry Louis Mencken published a scathing essay titled “The Sahara of the Bozart” in which he derided the American South for its lack of culture, political ignorance, degraded Anglo-Saxon stock, and “vexatious public problems.” He remarked, “It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity” and concluded that “for all its size and all its wealth and all the ‘progress’ it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually , culturally, as the Sahara Desert.” In fact, Mencken added, “It would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of a civilization.” Mencken also compared the South to the foreign lands of Asia Minor, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Estonia, the Balkans, and China and all but argued that the 2 • introduction region lacked American attributes and values.1 Although an earlier version of this essay drew scant attention in 1917, Mencken’s reworking of the piece in 1920 provoked not only a surge of enmity from traditionalists in the South but also a roar of approval from budding critics around the country. Even in the South condemnation of the region was robust. Between 1923 and 1929 southern newspapers as diverse as the Charleston News and Courier, Montgomery Advertiser, and Norfolk Virginia Pilot won Pulitzer Prizes for their editorials on the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, political backwardness, and buffoonish demagogues in the region. In 1924 Paul Green, editor of the Reviewer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, described the “horrible Menckenitis which is now breaking out over the lily-white body of our beautiful South, causing that most somnolent lady to scratch herself publicly in most unseemly parts, yea, even in the capitol [sic] buildings,” but he welcomed such an illness since “she has at last called upon the doctor.”2 Throughout the decade Mencken continued to lambaste and ridicule the South for its inadequacies and his work received national attention long after his death. Contemporary historians—as did many journalists and critics in the 1920s and 1930s—typically celebrate Mencken as the forerunner of a vigorous criticism of the South. They have argued that his caustic musings precipitated a wave of copycat South-bashing among nascent liberals in the region and neo-abolitionists in the North.3 Some critics of the South were content merely to ridicule. Others worked tirelessly to reform. In addition to Mencken and his imitators, the progenitors of a new regionalism drew attention to the South and its problems and advocated social engineering in response to regional deficiencies. Historians view the establishment of the Institute for Research in Social Science in 1924 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as evidence of the willingness of social scientists and reformers finally to come to terms with the shortcomings of the South. Four years before the establishment of the institute, the university appointed Howard W. Odum, a sociologist who had grown up in the rural South, to head the School of Public Welfare and the Department of Sociology. Two years later Odum founded the Journal of Social Forces, which focused on an assortment of problems in the South. Odum then presided over the new Institute for Research in Social Science, which continued to receive institutional funding well into the 1930s.The new “regionalism” at Chapel Hill aimed to put aside the “sectionalism” of the recent past and promote the integration of the region into the nation.4 Odum and his fellow sociologists and reformers acknowledged Regional, National, and Global Designs • 3 that the South had distinctive problems, but they believed that social scientific research and...