Three kinds of South: disappearing, ‘hanging in there,’ one that’s quite new

Follow the trail of kudzu vines in the United States, and you will find yourself in the South.

Kudzu thrives in the region’s hot, humid weather.

But it takes more than an imported Japanese vine to define the South, according to John Shelton Reed, who should know.

Reed, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has devoted his academic career to studying the South. A native of Tennessee and now director of UNC’s Institute for Research in Social Science, he has written such books as “Whistling Dixie” and “1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South.”

He came to Salisbury recently for a J. Fred Corriher and Mary A. Corriher Community Forum at Catawba College to share some of his knowledge of the South.

“In fact,” he confided, “I’m not really able to talk about much else.”

Reed described three Souths — one that’s disappearing, another that’s hanging in there, and a third one that’s “really quite new.”

The contrasts among them show what changes the region has undergone —and what ghosts of its post-Civil War poverty remain.

First, there’s the old South, whose fate was largely shaped by its climate.

Twice a year, a Chapel Hill group conducts a survey of 1,200 people across the country to ask a variety of questions. When they asked people “Would you say your community was in the South,” according to Reed, they got positive answers from people in 13 states.

The highest positive response came from Alabama, where 98 of respondents said they lived in the South. “I don’t know where the other 2 percent think they are,” Reed said.

Others were South Carolina, North Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Florida, Texas, Virginia, Kentucky and Oklahoma.

Reed said the first South is a geographic region identified mostly by its weather, which tends to be hot and wet. He showed several maps that roughly outlined the South — maps showing:

• Where kudzu is found in the United States: From eastern Texas to northern Florida. This region leaves out northern Virginia, which Reed said some refer to as “occupied Virginia.”

Kudzu was imported in 1876 but was not widely planted until the 1920s and 1930s, when it was touted for forage and erosion control. It’s now regarded more as a nuisance, killing trees and covering abandoned houses, yet it has become an icon of the South, Reed said. (James Dickey once called it “a vegetable form of cancer.”)

• Where cotton was grown in 1909: Areas with at least 200 frost-free days and more than 23 inches of rain. This is typically the deep South, which excludes Virginia and western North Carolina.
• Where there’s the greatest concentration of rural African Americans:This follows almost identically the cotton-growing map, revealing the impact of the plantation system that thrived before the Civil War.
• Where there’s the densest concentration of Confederate monuments and chapters of Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Put all this together and you’d have what might be called Dixie, the region most red-hot for secession. In the early 20th century, it became the Solid South, a region where the Democratic Party, states rights and white supremacy went hand-in-hand.

In 1904, when the nation elected progressive Republican Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency, the South went solidly for his conservative Democratic opponent, Judge Alton B. Parker —not exactly a household name now, not even in the South. Both candidates hailed from New York.

The Solid South has gradually become solidly Republican — signifying a party switch, but still leaving this as a cohesive political unit, and one with a deep problem.

“The Deep South, the cotton South, the heart of Dixie, was also where race relations were at their absolute worst for a long time,” Reed said.

A map showing a dot for every lynching illustrated his point. But there are signs of progress, Reed said, and flashed up two more maps that coincided with the South: one highlighting areas with the most effective black political representation, another showing cities with streets named after Martin Luther King Jr.

The South has indeed changed, Reed said. It came out of the Civil War as a desperately poor region, economically wrecked. In the 1930s, the average per capita income in the South was on par with that of Mexico today, he said — 50 percent of what it was for the rest of the country.

Now, he said, Southerners’ per capita income is about 90 percent of that for the rest of the nation, and an argument could be made that the cost of living in the region is lower, thus equalizing the figure, Reed said.

“Still, if you’re looking for poor, rural people, the South is a good place to start looking,” he said.

This is the second South, the residue of a culture shaped by cotton-growing and segregation —a South that is hanging on.

A map showing communities where the greatest percentage of the population lives in poverty showed a wide, dark swath of counties along the eastern coast and running into Texas.

This is the cotton belt, Reed said, the region where the most blacks still live in rural poverty.

Not all poor communities are black. Small clusters appeared in the coal-mining region of West Virginia (white), along the southern Texas border (Mexican-American) and on the Indian reservations of the West (Native American).

The old stereotype of the South painted this as a region without indoor plumbing. Fortunately, outhouses are becoming rarities. But a map of areas where people still use outhouses — few as they are —still mostly outlined the South. The exception is Maine, where Reed theorized that freezing pipes force the population to rely on alternatives.

Health problems reflect more residual effects of the South’s impoverished past, he said. The region has a disproportionate share of lung cancer, and most of the states with the lowest life expectancy are in the South. For the most part, though, the old South and its residual effects are disappearing, Reed said, and good riddance to them.

“I don’t know too many people nostalgic for hookworm and pellagra.”

A new South is emerging, and it has many things the old one lacked —things even more important than indoor plumbing. One of the problems of the Old South was that the geographic region had no infrastructure to hold it together, Reed said. As Karl Marx wrote from London back in 1861, Reed said, “It’s not a nation at all; it’s just a battle cry.”

Southern states seceded from the Union and declared themselves a new country, but the new country lacked a national press, a transportation system and a capital, he said.

It was just a sentiment, he said.

Most Civil War historians would agree, he said, that the South attempted the impossible: trying to build new national institutions at the same time it was fighting a war.

“The South is more of a nation now than it was when it was independent,” he said.

Its national press is Southern Living magazine, he said, an assertion that brought a few chuckles from the audience. But he went on to say that the South has several magazines and periodicals that are strictly its own.

As for transportation, Delta Airlines fits the bill. It started as a crop-dusting operation to fight the boll weevil, he said, but went on to pioneer the hub system of airline organization.

Atlanta serves as the South’s capital, he said, with regional bureaus and offices for countless organizations. “It’s the central place of the South.”

When Bell Telephone was broken into the “Baby” Bells, the criteria for organizing them became who was talking to whom, Reed said. They mapped out calling patterns and arrived at a map for the new BellSouth that he called a truncated South — again, no Virginia (which is increasingly oriented northward or mid-Atlantic) or Texas (which almost operates as its own nation). The headquarters is in Atlanta.

So Southerners talk to Southerners. And they’re talking about a South that has fulfilled sociologist Rupert Vance’s prediction — it has indeed demonstrated the triumph of history and culture over economics and geography.

Southern Living promotes the culture. Headquartered in Alabama, it has tremendous readership in North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia. It has saturated the market in the traditional South. But it has fewer readers in Texas —which has its own persona —and Florida. “Florida is the one state in the lower 48 where most people living there weren’t born there,” Reed said. Most weren’t even born in the South.

“Southern Living is not really speaking to them,” he said. They pick it up and see a story about the All-American football teams and they’re puzzled. Isn’t this supposed to be a home and garden magazine?

The South also has its own institutions of higher learning, Reed said. UNC for many years operated as a regional university, not just a state university, he said. The alumni chapter in Atlanta has 7,000 members. Southerners who grew up and wanted to go away to college — particularly bright, white males —often headed to Chapel Hill.

Texans, again, don’t figure into that heavily. “If you’re in Texas, you can go a long way from home and still be in Texas.”

What’s emerging, said Reed, is a South that’s defined not by geography or weather —and no longer by rural poverty — but rather by people who do things in Southern ways.

And it’s not what they do for a living —like picking cotton. It’s what they do in their leisure time. What they eat, what they drink, how they talk.

Some examples:

• Grits: Southerners don’t eat grits as much as they used to. “I’ve actually consulted with Quaker Grits, and they’re very concerned about that.” But more grits are consumed in this region than any other.
• Barbecue: Map out the membership of the National Barbecue Association, and once again you’ll have a map that’s primarily Southern.
• npeech:The Southern accent isn’t quite what it used to be. Reed said he once heard a taped conversation with an old Confederate veteran and could barely understand a word. (“People don’t talk that way, except Strom Thurmond.”)But many Southerners use distinctive phrases (“fixing to,” “might could”) and have persisted in using “y’all” so much that it’s actually catching on among the younger generation outside the South, Reed said.
• Religion: “The South was solid religiously before it was solid politically,” Reed said. Ninety percent of Southerners (excluding Texas and Florida) are Protestant, he said, and over half of those are Baptists. A map showing the majority religion in Southern counties shows a region awash in Baptists, with the exception of one Methodist county in Alabama, he said.

“Religious regionalism is alive and well. ... The South is more Baptist now than it was 100 years ago — largely at the expense of the Methodists.”

• Beverages:While other states lead the nation in consumption of beer, the South drinks up the most soft drinks. North Carolina is the top soft-drink-consuming state in the nation, Reed said, guzzling 55.4 gallons per every man, woman and child a year.

That fits, he said, with the fact that Coca-Cola was invented in Atlanta in 1886, the year the city adopted local Prohibition. It was called a “soft” drink because it didn’t contain alcohol. About 14 years passed before the Baptists figured out that it contained cocaine and the ingredient was removed.

• Miscellaneous: Due to their cultural conservatism, Southerners are less likely to be cremated, more likely to allow school children to be spanked, more likely to use the death sentence, less likely to approve the Equal Rights Amendment, more likely to segregate workers by sex.

And the South loves football. More National Football League players come from the South than from any other region. “Football has become to the South what rugby is to Wales,” Reed said.

From cotton fields to football fields, from slavery to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, the South has undergone tremendous change. And it has gone beyond geography.

“This cultural South is a far more dynamic and vital South,” Reed said.

He would like to be around 100 years from now to study it some more, he said.

“It won’t look like it does today.”