...They [young Southerners] had been fully exposed to all the loose precepts of modernism and were inclined to accept without question its fashionable notions. As a matter of course they believed that culture comes out of books; that wealth is the road to success and is to be achieved only by industrial expansion; that religion is a silly fable, or at best a loose rationalization of Christianity in terms of sociology; that progress is real and depends on science; that beauty is better than morality; that politics is unimportant; that education really educates.
Everybody, it seemed, was shouting about the backwardness of the South. The bustle of the rising Southern cities and the disadvantaged condition of the farmer confirmed them in disrespect for the old agrarian culture.
The liberals can serve this South if their intelligence achieves a natural association with the sources of feeling which, however blindly and confusedly, have kept alive in the South a sense of civilization, its own and not another's, which the decay of industrial capitalism makes it timely to encourage. The Southern liberals, in short, may escape their dilemma by becoming more Southern...
Sociology is a popular method of truthseeking today. And yet one would think it an unfavorable time for sociologizing. The fundamentals of sociology have much to do with the study of primitive and stable forms of society. Our society is changing so rapidly that one can hardly find in it the moment of repose when just observations can be made. The sociological truthseeker is like the man in the old Greek fable who comes to ask questions of Proteus. He must know what grip to use, and must hold on firmly through all manner of transformations. Then at last he may come upon some Protean wisdom, ancient as the sea...
The South is an overwhelmingly, invincibly agrarian area, caught helplessly between its own dimly understood and still living past and the demands of an assertive, recklessly exploitable nation that, under Northeastern leadership, has committed itself rather deeply to an urban, industrial vision of the future...
But the story of Southern deficiency means something more than "waste and lack of technology." Not even the finest technology, not the most earnest conservation can save a region from ruinous exploitation at the hands of a political-economic imperialism such as the South has had to face...
It would be interesting to know how much of every Northeastern dollar expended in the South or for Southern produce flows back eventually into the Northeast; and how much of every Southern dollar goes NE without ever returning to the Southern purse...
The South's position, relative to other regions, is one of colonial degradation.
They damn the South for not repairing its deficiencies; and by way of a tonic they offer another swig of the patent medicine that has been costly without being curative. They do not know, or do not care to know, that the debtor South, already ravaged by its creditors, cannot, out of its limited substance, pay for modern improvements and at the same time maintain its creditors in luxury...
Once they recognized the historical and theoretical significance of the region and of the power of the folk-regional society in "modern culture," it was inevitable that their studies would bring them face to face with the South's historic difficulty...By a devious, perhaps an unnecessarily arduous, route they have arrived upon the ground where John C. Calhoun began to do some hard thinking about a century ago...
The South, because of its regional differentiations, some of which are certainly valuable, is at a disadvantage, and so long as political and economic power dwells where it long has dwelt, it will continue to be at a disadvantage...
Regional differentiations are among the principal causes...of disadvantage. But if you are an abstract nationalist, or, as folks long ago used to say, a leveller, you are certain to miss the point. If you look at New York and then look at Georgia, and see that the former is more or less orderly and shipshape after a modern manner, and that the latter is disorderly and shabby, after a strange mixture of modern and ancient manners, you will never be able to conclude, unless you are a regionalist, that the disorderliness of Georgia is anything but a quaint or an annoying exhibition of depravity...
Southern states rated lowest in all those indices - such as schools and libraries - which connoted "civilization"; and highest in those - such as homicides and malaria which connoted "barbarism."
Nobody added up the figures and asked whether the remarkable surplus of libraries in the Northeast could possibly have anything to do with the lack of them in the Southeast - Nobody wondered whether a certain kind of valid cultural preference might be tied up with the economic unbalance: the kind of preference that would make a Georgia cracker want to spend an extra quarter on ammunition to shoot squirrels rather than on a copy of The New Yorker...
The regional grip is the right one, and the only right one, for the sociological Proteus. Held in that that grip, Proteus ceases to bewilder and begins to say what is to be done in this or that agitated corner. And then one can also think, or begin to think, about that unholy mess of regions which is the world...
Mr. Odum is certain that the Southern culture, far from being "decadent," is in reality to be called "immature." It has enormous vitality, even in those attitudes which sociologists call survivals: its ways of humor, its stubborn bantering threats to outsiders," and various "defense mechanisms."
The issue is not really bringing the South "up" to modern standards, but of making modern standards worth accepting by the South.
"I am not undertaking to answer the charge that I am ignorant. It is true. I am an ignorant man. I have had no college education. But the thing that takes me far in politics is that I do not have to color what comes into my mind and into my heart. I say it unvarnished. I say it without veneer. I have not the learning to do otherwise, and therefore my ignorance is often not detected. I know the hearts of the people because I have not colored my own. I know when I am right in my own conscience. I do not talk one way in the cloakroom and another way out here. I do not talk one way back there in the hills of Louisiania and another way here in the Senate. I have one language. Ignorant as it is, it is the universal language within the sphere in which I operate. Its simplicity gains pardon for my lack of letters and education." - Henry Clay
The problem:
1) securing united action in the South
2) securing something like national awareness of the Southern dilemma
How can the South be awakened to such action?
How can the nation be made to understand that blood transfusion must now replace the blood sucking of the last seventy years?
Only one force has ever drawn the Southern states together for a vast concerted effort, and that is the lusty force of strong sectional feeling.
Without realizing what he is doing, the average Southerner in practice separates his private folkways from his public opinions and actions. For himself as an individual he is responsible; for what goes on in the greater world he is not responsible. After long years of subjection he has learned to take social programs as he takes the weather. They generally come from far away, he is not responsible for them, he will do nothing about them until it becomes necessary to vote down a child labor amendment or check a racial equality movement. He is oriental in his tolerance of social movements originating elsewhere, until they begin to intrude upon his English-Scotch notion of private and clan responsibility...
The South must either play sectional politics, or it must still be a dependent, hoping to receive a bounty on terms that will not be too disagreeable or humiliating...In a like dilemma, Calhoun reluctantly proposed Southern Independence.
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