Poor Whites of the South

Abstract

A NUMBER of recent events have tended to revivify the problem and dilemma of the whites in the South. The literary and dramatic scene, with its flood of literature about the South and its presentations of the South on Broadway, is, of course, one chief factor. It would seem that the Nation has become Tobacco Road conscious to the extent of a relatively new and almost universal caricature of the great body of poor southern rural and industrial folk as poor whites. Along with this convergence of attention, from another direction has come the rediscovery of the farm tenants by both the North and the South emphasizing one aspect of the low standards of living and near-poverty of millions of southern folk brought into focus by the depression. The rise and incidence of regionalism, in which the trend is to inventory the several regions, due to the necessity of the New Deal differentials as well as to the general movement of American Regionalism, have been other factors focusing attention upon the human as well as the physical resources of the southern regions. It seems likely that this last may be the most important of all recent developments in that it furnishes the framnework for the present trend to study the people of the South as human resources in relation to the development of a richer regional and national culture. This study of the southern people is one of the musts in the program of research and planning for the next period of development in the South and the Nation. It is commonly said that no region of the Nation has been so completely documented as has the South. This seems quite likely, and certainly never before have there been such comprehensive inventories of its wealth and waste, its resources and prospects, and never before perhaps has there been such high motivation on the part of the South to achieve new realities in regional development and achievement. Howard W. Odumn, in Southern Regions of the United States, has made a most thorough-going analysis of the great resources of the South, both physical and human. He has shown that the region has a superabundance in potentiality of both and needs only the skill and technology of science and trained people to translate them, on the one hand, into capital and wealth, and, on the other, into richer institutions and a superior people. Theoretically, of course, this is the old problem of the conservation and utilization of the people in harmony with land and the folk regional society.