Author: John Shelton Reed

Most of my working life has been spent talking and writing about the American South. That may need explaining. 

When I was asked a while back to list underappreciated books about the South, I wrote this about Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place:

Basically, South to a Very Old Place does for black and white Southerners what Murray’sThe Omni-Americans does for Americans in general, seeking and celebrating commonalities across racial lines. Murray’s friend Willie Morris, a white Mississippian who was for a time the editor of Harper’s, tells a story in his memoir North Toward Home. “At Al Murray’s apartment in Harlem,” he writes, “on New Year’s Day 1967, the Murrays, the [Ralph] Ellisons, and the Morrises congregated for an unusual feast: bourbon, collard greens, black-eyed peas, ham-hocks, and cornbread—a kind of ritual for all of us.” When Southerners get together outside the South to eat Southern food it is a special occasion, a “ritual,” fraught with cultural significance. Both black and white are, in that moment, self-consciously Southern, set apart from the non-Southerners around them and celebrating their distinctiveness. 

Basically, South to a Very Old Place does for black and white Southerners what Murray’sThe Omni-Americans does for Americans in general, seeking and celebrating commonalities across racial lines.

Compare that to what goes on at Angie’s Restaurant in Garner, North Carolina, where the same food (except the bourbon) is served six days a week (they close on Sunday). The place is always full of Southerners eating Southern food, but in that setting the diners aren’t thinking of themselves as Southerners (that’s a given) and the food isn’t seen as Southern food; it’s just food. 

Being outside the South does wonders for Southern self-consciousness. And it’s not just Southerners who react this way: In Idols of the Tribe: Group Identity and Political Change (1975), Harold Isaacs observes that the salience of many other “basic group identities” depends largely on context. This is just one way that Southerners resemble groups more often thought of as “ethnic.” That analogy occurred to me in graduate school and I’ve made my living for decades now by exploring it. My own biography had a lot to do with that realization, and that’s what this essay is about.

But first: Murray said some hard things about my discipline of sociology. I believe, though, that his argument was really with just a particular kind of sociology, the kind that portrayed black America as a tangle of pathologies that needed to be cured from outside. For the record, two of his bad examples weren’t actually sociologists–Kenneth Clark (“pathologies of racism”) was a psychologist and Oscar Lewis (“culture of poverty”) an anthropologist—but I get his point, and I know how he felt. Until recently, the South has been subject to the same treatment, practically defined by its problems of rural poverty and abysmal race relations, by ignorance, poverty, bigotry, and disease. It’s annoying.

I believe that Murray would have been comfortable with a sociology that doesn’t seek pathologies to treat or (these days) grievances to air, but tries simply to observe, describe, and understand. Surely he would not have objected to a hoary sociological generalization like the one that says members of any ethnic or cultural group who are somehow marginal to the group are more likely to think about it than those who are more comfortably and unquestionably members. This proposition has the paradoxical corollary that the group’s most self-conscious members are often the least typical, men and women whose backgrounds and experiences put them somehow on the edge of the group. Living outside it—like a Southerner in New York—is the most extreme example.

Of course, some who leave the South just stop being Southerners, but for those who don’t, leaving often turns out to be, as they say, a “consciousness-raising experience.”  Southerners who’ve lived outside the South are more likely than those who haven’t to say that they’ve thought about the South a lot, to say that they often think of themselves as Southerners, to believe that there are important differences between Southerners and other Americans, and to be ready to tell us what those differences are. This shouldn’t be surprising. Why think about the South if you’ve never known anything else? Louis Rubin has written of the importance of this experience in the biographies of Southern writers, and I’ve analyzed survey data to show similar effects for ordinary folks. That was my experience, and it was surely Albert Murray’s, too.

But note that there are other ways to achieve marginality. It’s striking, for instance, how many Southerners who write about the South have come from the edges of the region — from Texas or Arkansas or Tennessee or Kentucky, parts of the South remote from the region’s cultural heartland, whether that be the antebellum Virginia-Carolina heartland or the Deep South that set the region’s tone and defined its agenda until the 1970s or so. If you look at twentieth-century Southern intellectuals who took the South as their subject, I believe you’ll find far more from the upland South and the Southwest than random selection would predict. Those subregions have always stood in an equivocal relation to The South proper: if growing up there produces Southerners at all, it seems to produce especially thoughtful ones.

If you look at twentieth-century Southern intellectuals who took the South as their subject, I believe you’ll find far more from the upland South and the Southwest than random selection would predict. Those subregions have always stood in an equivocal relation to The South proper: if growing up there produces Southerners at all, it seems to produce especially thoughtful ones.

Marginality can also be familial. Growing up with parents from the wrong place, or the wrong ethnic group, can make you think. As Eudora Welty, the Mississippi daughter of a West Virginia mother and Ohio father, put it, you learn that there is usually more than one side to a story. People can be marginalized even by vicarious exposure to outsiders, through education or the mass media, for instance. And now that so many of our cities are receiving migrants from other parts, perhaps it is not surprising to find that urban Southerners show higher levels of regional consciousness than rural ones. 

There’s a danger here. There are so many ways to become marginal that we can probably find at least one of these factors in the background of any Southerner, self-conscious or not. We need some careful statistical analysis before we conclude that there is a link between marginality and consciousness. But, as a matter of fact, I’ve done that analysis, in a book called Southerners: The Social Psychology of Sectionalism, and the link exists. Regional consciousness, it appears, is heightened (1) by urban upbringing and residence, (2) by education, (3) by exposure to the national mass media, and (4) by travel and residence outside the South.

Put all this together, and you get a recipe for intense self-consciousness. Some will know a peculiar book called I’ll Take My Stand (1930), a manifesto written (the title page says) by “Twelve Southerners,” to defend what they saw as the South’s “agrarian” way of life. I wrote about those twelve once, pointing out that all of them were highly educated, all had become urban, all had lived outside the South, and three-quarters came originally from the outer South. These characteristics made them very unusual Southerners in the 1920s, and practically guaranteed that they would at least give the South a good deal of thought.

I didn’t have much choice either. I grew up in the upper South, in a town with an abnormally high concentration of Northern immigrants, one of them my own mother. I lingered in college and graduate school indecently long, and (most important, I think) I did so in Boston and New York. Looking back, I can see that my raising and even my ancestry constantly put me on the boundary between the South and the . . . non-South, the Other (if you will) that defines the South. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that there was a South and that it was different. 

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that there was a South and that it was different. 

Start with where I come from. The names of the elementary schools in my hometown will tell you that to within a hundred miles: George Washington (no help there), but also Robert E. Lee and Frederick Douglass — plainly, we are in the South. Add Andrew Jackson (probably the upper South), Abraham Lincoln (the reconstructed South), and (the dead giveaway) Andrew Johnson: obviously upper East Tennessee, the old State of Franklin.

Now, to be sure, East Tennessee is Southern, as those school names indicate. There are other markers as well: Baptists, moonshine whiskey, country music, family feuds, stock-car racing, Moon Pies (from Chattanooga) — all of these indicators put it firmly in the South. But it’s a funny kind of South. For starters, it’s overwhelmingly white; partly in consequence, between 1861 and 1865, attachment to the Confederate government in Richmond was a sometime thing, at best. Many mountain men spent the war years burning each others’ barns and dodging the Union and Confederate drafts with fine impartiality. I mentioned Andrew Johnson, a self-taught tailor from Greenville and an East Tennessee home-boy with little use for flatland aristocrats. And Tennessee’s Reconstruction governor was a Methodist preacher from Knoxville, Parson Brownlow, who had a fine Southern way with words. (After one Confederate defeat, for instance, he chortled gleefully that “F.F.V.” should stand not for First Families of Virginia but for fleet-footed Virginians.)

Moreover, my hometown of Kingsport is a funny part of East Tennessee. It pretty much dates from just before 1920, when Eastman Kodak built a branch plant there. So when I was growing up, engineers and executives from Rochester, New York, were constantly cycling through town, with their families. The plant and the other industries that grew up around it — a paper mill, a press, textile mills, a munitions factory, a glass plant, cement works — attracted workers and executives from other parts of the country, too, in particular from the lowland South. (My high-school girlfriend, later my wife, was the daughter of Georgians, her father an Eastman engineer.)

Given all this, perhaps it’s not surprising that relatively good-natured rough-housing between Yanks and Rebs was a regular feature of my junior-high lunchtimes. Like Bill Clinton, I was a jolly fat boy and usually contrived to avoid these scuffles, but I confess that my sympathies and, when necessary, my fists were with the bluebellies, because the distinction was more political than social, and as much contemporary as historical: to a great extent Yankee and Rebel meant the same thing as Republican and Democrat, and my family has been Republican on both the native and the immigrant sides.

My father’s people have been in East Tennessee and southwest Virginia since the eighteenth century (because, the family joke has it, some Carolinian forebears were looking for the Cumberland Gap and couldn’t find it), but most of my father’s ancestors were Scotch-Irish and Germans who came down the Shenandoah Valley from Pennsylvania. (Perhaps there were some “Melungeons,” too, but that’s another story.) Like most folks with roots in the Southern hills, we have kin who fought on both sides and neither between 1861 and 1865. Tennessee’s Confederate Senator Landon Carter Haynes may have been some kind of cousin, but family lore says that another ancestor was the captain of a Unionist home guard unit in southwest Virginia, a man who fought “the Democrats” (as his daughter put it later) — until they killed him. I don’t know much about this forebear and I am reluctant to look into it because I like the story the way I have it, but as I’ve heard it, his daughter spoke of going with a slave woman to retrieve his frozen body from the wintry mountaintop battlefield. In other words, this ancestor was apparently a slaveholding Unionist (which may suggest that my folks have always had a way of missing the point). In 1860 Daniel Hundley, an Alabamian practicing law in Chicago, published Social Relations in Our Southern States, an attempt to educate Northerners about the many different kinds of Southerners. One kind was what my kinsman must have been: the sort of yeoman slaveholder who “works side by side with his slaves in the fields and is not dismayed when they call him familiarly by his Christian name.” This image of slavery — a smallholder and one or two slaves working the fields together, calling each other “Bob” and “Jimmy” — is not the image most familiar to us, and of course it was not the experience of most slaves, but it may have been the experience of many slaveholders, especially in the upland South. 

Anyway, in the mountains conflicting loyalties did not end with Appomattox. For that matter, the fighting didn’t entirely end either; it continued in some parts in the guise of feuds like the Confederate Hatfields versus the Unionist McCoys (we’re kin to the McCoys). My grandfather always claimed to be related to “Uncle Alf” and “Fiddling Bob” Taylor, sons of a Unionist father and Confederate mother, who ran against each other for governor in the famous Tennessee election of 1886 known at the time as the War of the Roses. (Robert Love Taylor, the Democrat, won that one, but Alfred was finally elected in the Republican landslide of 1920.)

All these genealogical facts may begin to explain not only my interest in the South but my politics. Some yellow-dog Democrats I know used to see support for their party as a badge of Southernness and reproached me for my habit (at the time) of voting Republican or staying home. But I made no apologies for supporting the Grand Old Party of Richard Petty and Roy Acuff.  No Republican ever killed a relative of mine.

Twenty-five years before me, my father left Kingsport to go to college in the North, in his case with an Eastman scholarship to the University of Rochester. There he met my mother, a Rochester girl — that is, as I said, a Yankee. She was not just a courtesy Yankee, either, but the real thing, with New England names like Peabody and Griswold scattered about the family tree, intermixed with more recent immigrants–and, speaking of marginality, with some pretty odd sorts: Alsatian Germans and Anglo-Irish. She even sang “Marching Through Georgia” to her children (I’m not making this up).

After my father finished medical school, my parents moved to New York City where he did his internship and residency, and where, to my embarrassment every time I have to show my passport, I was born. (As the Duke of Wellington growled when someone referred to his Irish birth, just because someone was born in a stable doesn’t mean he’s a horse.)

Shortly after World War II we moved back to Kingsport, to the house my grandparents built, and it has always been home to me. Some of my earliest memories, however, are of summer vacations in the Finger Lakes country with Northern aunts, uncles, and cousins — that, and the interminable drive up the Shenandoah Valley on U.S. 11, retracing in reverse the Reeds’ trek of two hundred years before, past Dr. Childress’s Snake and Monkey Farm, Burma-Shave signs, and historical markers for Stuart and Sheridan and Mosby, through the little towns of the Valley to Winchester, where we usually stopped for the night, then on the next morning into the North: to Hagerstown, Chambersburg, and beyond.

The upshot of all this was that I finished high school with an exceptional degree of regional consciousness. I knew that some folks were Southerners and others were not, and despite my junior-high lunchtime Unionist sympathies, I knew I was a Southerner (I had my Northern cousins to remind me). But I didn’t feel strongly about it. It was just a fact, one of many answers to the question “Who are you?”—but pretty far down the list.

The upshot of all this was that I finished high school with an exceptional degree of regional consciousness. I knew that some folks were Southerners and others were not, and despite my junior-high lunchtime Unionist sympathies, I knew I was a Southerner (I had my Northern cousins to remind me). But I didn’t feel strongly about it. It was just a fact, one of many answers to the question “Who are you?”—but pretty far down the list.

When I enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960, however, it moved up in importance. My reasons for going to college in the North had little to do with escaping from the South, or anything like that. It’s just that I was pretty hot stuff in East Tennessee algebra circles, thought I wanted to be a mathematician, and MIT sounded like a good place to go if that’s what you wanted to be. But I would be lying if I said I didn’t know what Thomas Wolfe meant when he wrote of going north that “every young man from the South has felt this precise and formal geography of the spirit, this tension of the nerves, . . . this gritting of the teeth and hardening of the jaws, this sense of desperate anticipation” — and so forth, at length. It was exciting to be on my own in a big, strange Yankee city. I learned many things in Cambridge, and later at graduate school in New York City, among them that I am not a mathematician and that I really am a Southerner. In their different ways, those discoveries changed my life.

Autobiography strikes me as an act of presumption in the young, but the importance for my subsequent work of where I went to school was so obvious to me that, at the ripe old age of thirty-nine, I wrote an essay about it. I put it in a rather coy third person, but it’s me, all right. In Cambridge, my “young Tennessean” learned that

This account goes on at almost Wolfean length, and I won’t quote myself any more (the essay was reprinted in my book, One South). The point is just that “the result of all this was that Southerners in Cambridge at that time almost had to think about the South.” Certainly I did, and I began to read about it, too, although this reading had to be on the side, since I’m pretty sure MIT didn’t offer any courses in Southern history or literature. Anyway, it never occurred to me that I could do my Southern studies for credit, much less as a career.

After I moved on to graduate school at Columbia, I continued to think and read about the South, and to return to it when I could. I was prompted by my Northern friends’ curiosity about it, and increasingly by my own. But it was not until I took a course on evaluation research that I finally wrote something about it. Our assignment in that course was to assess the effectiveness of some social-action program, and I undertook to evaluate a group from the 1930s that I had read about in W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. Somehow I learned that the Association’s records were in the library of Atlanta University, so I drove to Atlanta one Christmas vacation and immersed myself in those papers (with a sideways glance at the life of that remarkable institution). The resulting term paper became my first professional publication, an article in the journal Social Problems.

But that paper was a sport. I still thought of myself as an aspiring methodologist, and only an incidental and amateur student of the South — witness the fact that when I ventured out of the sociology department for courses I went only as far as social psychology, not to Columbia’s excellent department of history. My next venture in writing about the South, my dissertation, started out as a methodological exercise.

One of my teachers at Columbia was the great methodologist and mathematical sociologist, Paul Felix Lazarsfeld. My math background gave me a considerable advantage with Lazarsfeld, and I soon found myself working as both a teaching and research assistant for this remarkable man. Lazarsfeld was a Viennese Jew, a refugee from the Nazis. His mother had been an early psychoanalyst, a student of Freud himself. As a teenage socialist, Lazarsfeld reputedly took over the Vienna radio station at gunpoint in the revolution of 1919. Trained in mathematics and psychology, he wrote well in three languages and spoke some others, played viola in a string quartet, and was, in short, a splendid example of Mitteleuropa at its finest. He could not have been a more exotic figure to an East Tennessee boy like me if he had come from the moon. 

I wasn’t familiar at the time with Albert Murray’s Omni-American vision of shared humanity, but my experience with Lazarsfeld affirmed it. That experience is one reason I’m skeptical about the claim that students need “role models” from backgrounds like their own. As Murray’s friend Ralph Ellison put it, we can “choose our ‘ancestors.’” My own education was almost entirely in the hands of teachers who extended my experience and challenged my ignorance in fundamental ways. 

Lazarsfeld found my growing interest in the South amusing (from his perspective, American regional differences were trivial), and I remember his telling me about his son’s visit to Texas. Asked what was different from New York, young Robbie had reported that the license plates were a different color.

Anyway, both he and my other principal teacher, the distinguished survey researcher Herbert Hyman, were enthusiastic about the potential for “secondary analysis,” taking old public opinion surveys and reanalyzing them to answer questions other than those they were designed to address. When it came time for me to write a dissertation, I set out to produce an example of this sort of work by using thirty years’ worth of Gallup Polls to document the decrease in regional differences in attitudes and values as the South had become an urban, industrial region increasingly like the rest of the United States. 

Well, that wasn’t what I found. Again and again, the differences I was looking at turned out to be as large in the 1960s as they had been twenty or thirty years earlier, and they couldn’t be made to go away by statistical controls for the demographic differences between the South and the rest of the country.  I came to know the despair of the graduate student whose dissertation is falling apart in his hands, until I lit upon not so much an explanation as a category of similar, puzzling phenomena: the idea that Southerners were behaving like the immigrant ethnic groups that I had come to know in Boston and New York, groups whose own resistance to assimilation was just then being discovered and chronicled in books with titles like Beyond the Melting Pot and The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics. The quite unexpected result was a dissertation later published with the title The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society.

I came to know the despair of the graduate student whose dissertation is falling apart in his hands, until I lit upon not so much an explanation as a category of similar, puzzling phenomena: the idea that Southerners were behaving like the immigrant ethnic groups that I had come to know in Boston and New York, groups whose own resistance to assimilation was just then being discovered and chronicled in books with titles like Beyond the Melting Pot and The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics.

Once Lazarsfeld set me the task of compiling his bibliography, comprising hundreds of articles in several languages, published over a forty-year period. When I marveled at his prolixity, he remarked that all of these publications were merely working out the implications of four original ideas. Not a modest man, he quickly added that this is four more than most people have, and three more than it takes to make a career. As I said earlier, the idea that Southerners can be viewed as a quasi-ethnic group has been my career-making idea. I learned later that it wasn’t even original with me, but it has turned out to be a powerful metaphor – not so much answering questions as suggesting what questions to ask. With that in place, the outlines of almost everything I have done since were pretty well set. Since then, I’ve used the tools of my trade and any others I could lay hands on to sort out as best I could what Southerness is all about — which is to say, in this respect, who I am. 

I was lucky to stumble into a line of work where I can actually make a living from this sort of self-examination: most people have to pay for psychotherapy. But it is sobering to realize that if I had gone to the University of Tennessee, or Vanderbilt, or Chapel Hill, or Georgia Tech, I would almost certainly have done something else with my life. Probably not mathematics, though.

The last part of this essay is adapted from a paper presented at a Conference on Southern Autobiography at the University of Central Arkansas in 1993 (thanks to Bill Berry) and published in my book Minding the South (2003).