Regionalism and the South: Selected Papers of Rupert Vance (review)

Southeastern Geographer Vol. 22, No. 2, November 1982, pp. 153-158 REVIEWS The Southeastern Geographer inaugurates this review section of selected recently published works in geography and closely allied disciplines on the South. The opinions expressed are those of the reviewers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor or of the Southeastern Division of the Association ofAmerican Geographers, who assume no responsibility for their contents. Regionalism and the South: Selected Papers of Rupert Vance. John Shelton Reed and Daniel Joseph Singal, eds. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. xxii and 353 pp., figs., tables, index, and bibliography. $26.00 cloth. (ISBN 0-8078-1513-6) It is extraordinarily difficult for anyone who does not have a vivid imagination (or an exceptionally long memory) to appreciate the grim and depressing state of the South a mere half century ago. To borrow the words of Rupert B. Vance, native son, lifelong resident, and distinguished student of the region, "in agriculture, the one-crop system, cotton ; in politics, the one-party system, Bourbon democracy; in industry, another one-crop system, textiles; in religion, the one true church, Bible Belt Protestantism" (p. 253). "The risks of the cotton market combine with the risks of the weather and the weevil ... to perpetuate tenancy and its attendant evils: inadequate housing, inefficient methods of agriculture , isolation, dependence on credit, backward community institutions , illiteracy, mobility, shiftlessness, and lack ofthrift" (p. 50). "The most successful cotton farmer is the one who can command a large amount of human labor within his own household .... The one-horse cotton farmer accepts the fieldwork of his womenfolks and children as a matter of course. This attitude ... is carried into cotton-mill villages" (pp. 2223 ). "The Negro cropper, the white tenant, and the small cotton farmer live upon a basic diet of salt fat pork, corn bread, and molasses. This forms the 'three M diet,' meat, meal, and molasses, . . . pellagra producing " (p. 22). "Yellow fever, . . . hookworm, malaria, and ill-chosen diet . . . have largely created the stereotype ofthat lean, cadaverous, yellowcomplexioned , shiftless southerner" (p. 54). 154Southeastern Geographer Some of these words are angry words—it was hard for any feeling person not to be angry in the South between the two world wars—but it was an anger of hope rather than an anger of despair. Vance believed that "the handicaps of the South . . . are amenable to science and social engineering" (p. 55), and the first step toward improvement was an inventory of resources, especially human resources, and the manner in which they were being squandered. His catalog of the ills of the region was such an inventory, and he went on to propose courses of action that he hoped would help to alleviate these ills. He was deeply concerned with public policy, because he realized that action was necessary at the national level, but he also knew that national policies can be ineffective or even disastrous when applied at the regional level in ignorance of regional conditions. The farm programs of the New Deal, for example, worked well in regions of small farm owners, for which they were designed , but they foundered in the share-cropping areas of the South. For nearly 50 years Vance was one of the luminaries of the group of sociologists that Howard W. Odum had assembled in Chapel Hill. "Regionalism " was the shibboleth, the slogan, the catchword of the group. It was one of the "isms" of the 1930s, a loose, almost mystical, ideology that embraced policies and advocated programs, although the regionalists were never able to define their credo to the satisfaction of nonbelievers , and it is not easy for a mere heathen to figure out what it meant. Certainly "regionalism" was a battle cry (or epithet), a creed of advocacy and political activism to remedy the ills of society. The ills of society are specific to regions, and any solutions would have to be regional -specific. As Vance put it, "the region in which people live determines their occupation and income. In turn this determines the kind of family life" (p. 318). The regionalists argued that problems of economic and social development should be examined in the context of the distinctive...