largely dominated the field of southern history—Howard Odum was by far
the most prominent. He founded the sociology department, a school of so-
cial work, the Institute for Research in Social Science, and the immediately
prestigious and politically risk-taking journalSocial Forces. By the late s
and s, when government and foundation grants vastly expanded aca-
demic sponsored research, Odum became the very model of the university
empire builder. Neither his empire nor his goals were quite original. Odum
was doubtlessly aware of the ‘‘Wisconsin idea’’ of his youth, when that
Yankee state’s principal public university was dedicated to public service
and, by the standards of the day, lavishly supported and loved by Wiscon-
sin taxpayers and politicians. Now North Carolina and the Southeast had
their Madison. Odum broadened and deracialized Thomas Pearce Bailey’s
social science and applied it to the great complex of southern ills.Social
Forcescampaigned for cures with scrupulously gathered data. Odum’s col-
leagues (the most prominent being his own former doctoral students) and
graduate students published their larger works with the warmly receptive
University of North Carolina Press.
During these two interwar decades Odum reprised—without Bailey’s
bias—his old love of Afro-southern song and lore, and he wrote a novel. His
most important work, though, was the summativeSouthern Regions of the
United States(). The ‘‘of ’’ in his title might have been capitalized or ren-
dered in bold, further to emphasize the author’s departure from lingering
southern white separatism. Odum, as every social scientist must, despised
romantic essentialism and mischievous chauvinism. His South was defin-
able as a region, demographically, economically, educationally, legally (in
terms of crime, say), and by other data-based means. It was changing, too,
and it required more change—preferably planned, well financed, and hu-
mane change. All elements of southern problems were linked—racial op-
pression, for instance, with economic and environmental matters. All were
structural (as well as ultimately moral) matters, to be addressed both scien-
tifically and democratically.Southern Regionswas a master blueprint, then,
for a massive transformation, a kinder-hearted version of what is called
modernization, that would likely render the South less southern.
No wonder that Odum’s magnum opus elicited howls of protest from
older, conservative white newspaper editors and especially from a group of
youngish poets and critics associated with Vanderbilt University and Nash-
ville called the Agrarians. In twelve of them (including two histori-
ans) had published a ‘‘manifesto’’ against modernism in all its disturbing
modes: alienating industrialization, urbanization, and the most insidious