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Southern Cultures 7.1 (2001) 14-20



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Essay

An Episcopalian Imagination

Michael O'Brien

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I am commissioned here to discuss the influence of John Shelton Reed. But on whom? On historians of the American South, like myself? I am not sure John Reed has had any influence on historians, at least in the direct sense. Though his writing is suffused with a sense of history, there is remarkably little formal history in his work. Is it, instead, the case that his influence has lain in transmitting from his own discipline insights, theory, and technique, by which southern studies has been enriched? Has Reed brought us riches from the world of sociology, which have made us see things anew? Well, not really.

Reed seems barely engaged with his own discipline, as if he does a bit of sociology now and again so that they will not revoke his citizenship and deport him to some Devil's Island for disaffected social scientists. Indeed, he is inclined to abuse the trade of sociology, laments that regional sociology is dead, except for him, tells other sociologists off for writing atrociously. Certainly, he has his polling data; all those graphs and maps and indices that define the shifting landscape of southern identity. These facts he has passed along to us. And they are useful. It is pleasant to have a graph or a table. It is nice and formal. We can know, for example, that in Duluth in 1976 the ratio of southern to American entries in the names of businesses listed in the Yellow Pages was zero, but by 1988 had risen to .03, whereas in Winston-Salem it had fallen from .84 to .81. You may wish to know this. I myself do not find it positively repulsive as a piece of information, but it does seem to me the intellectual equivalent of a pretzel nugget.

In truth, this is not a good time to be an emissary from sociology. The discipline, once so promising, has lost adherents and drifted to the margins of the intellectual world. How many historians now read any sociology? Be honest. When did any of you last look at a sociological journal? When did you last pick up a book entitled New Perspectives on Sociology and History? When was there last such a book? Who would send a history graduate student to take courses in a sociology department? Does your local university still have a sociology department? No, not a good time.

Why should we, then, care for John Shelton Reed's influence on historians and other critics who study the South? Well, we probably should not. I think he has had some role in reassuring modern South-watchers that their subject matter is not disappearing, a disquiet that much troubled historians of the South in the 1950s and 1960s. Any old graph helps to fend off the prospect--grim to some (not to me)--that studying the South will become like studying Merovingian ascetics, the contemplation of vanished flagellations and unintelligible tombs.

John Reed is important for other reasons, more compelling, more elusive. As he himself has been at pains to insist, the South requires constant reinvention to survive. What matters is less the land or the climate or some hard positivist thing called the South, than the social psychology of the persons who claim the title of [End Page 14] southerners. This is a matter of will. Those with such wills are important. Reed has been among the most successful modern reinventors of the tradition, one of the people who help us see what they say is around us. But, first, upon his own testimony, he needed to invent the South for himself, being an east Tennesseean to whom such matters were not self-evident except from the standpoint of Massachusetts and New York, where he was educated. Such a route has made him unusually sensitive to the processes of migration, modernization, change. Unlike many southern conservatives, who see the South as a sort of rock that survives the erosion of time and Yankees, Reed views the South as created by...

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