Regionalism in the Great Depression

Abstract

REGIONALISM seemed to become an preoccupation during the great depression of the 1930s. During that decade regionalism was widely and urgently discussed by artists, folklorists, social scientists, planners, architects, and engineers. Scores of conferences, roundtable discussions, federal commissions, and symposia were devoted to regionalism, while a swarm of journals sponsored continued debates on the topic. Many of the greatest expressions of regional thought were published during the 1930s: the Southern Agrarians' I'll Take My Stand (1930), Great Plains (1931) by Walter Prescott Webb, Significance of Sections in History (1932) by Frederick Jackson Turner, American Regionalism (1938) by Howard Odum and Harry E. Moore, and Culture of Cities (1938) by Lewis Mumford are among the most prominent of a host of regional publications. Regional thought flourished throughout the country. Centers of regional theory developed at Vanderbilt University and at the universities of North Carolina, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Montana as well as among groups of planners in New York City and Washington, D.C. Regional ideologies ranged from the left, where Benjamin Botkin, Constance Rourke, and others envisioned the fruitful marriage of regionalism and the cause of workers; toward the center where Arthur E. Morgan, David Lilienthal, and others used regionalism as a tool for New Deal reform; to the right where Donald Davidson, John Gould Fletcher, and others perceived regionalism as a way to stave off the evil dispensation of the industrial Leviathan and to restore traditional, agrarian societies. 1 Regional visions of culture motivated painters as disparate as Joe Jones and Grant Wood, writers as diverse as Jack Conroy and Allen Tate, intellectuals as different as Lewis Mumford and Mary Austin. Beginning in the 1920s and peaking in the mid-1930s, regional considerations marked the frontiers in academic disciplines such as anthropology, geography, history, political science, and sociology. During the decade of the great depression, people who described themselves as agrarians, distributists, decentralists, back-to-the-land and subsistence-homesteading advocates were often affected by regional sentiments. The United States was more eagerly anatomized during the 1930s than it had ever been before or since. The search for the primal spatial structure of the