of evils, godless relativism.I’ll Take My Standhad its points both principled
and elegiac, and it deserves to be in print even to this day. Moral and ethi-
cal relativism, after all, have not gone away as issues; rather, the opposite.
Still, the agrarian manifesto was simultaneously and unambiguously white-
biased and naive on rural life, labor, and authority and hopelessly uncon-
nected to issues of social justice, health, landscape, and much else. Odum
and his colleagues—now known as the Chapel Hill Regionalists—were con-
nected; they were, in fact, not only modernists but mutualists and holists.^42
Howard Odum in his own home seems quite comfortably to have con-
nected southern versions of pasts and futures. Forever in rumpled suits
and unassuming of demeanor, he nonetheless built for himself, his family,
and his omnipresent students and guests an enormous house near the
campus in Chapel Hill. Maids, a cook, and a butler tended to cleaning,
order, food, and protocol. In addition to a master bedroom for the lord
and lady of the manor, there were separate rooms for each of the three
children, for a couple of graduate students in sociology, and yet another
for visitors—usually invited speakers, consultants, and officials. Among
the Odums’ guests, well before World War II, was the occasional black
traveler who otherwise would have found no decent accommodation in
Chapel Hill. So Odum, schooled in scientific racism, had grown demo-
cratic as well as practical. He did need, after all, the expertise of black
professionals in his work. Black anthropologists and folklorists—notably
Zora Neale Hurston—disparaged and dismissed even Odum’s later, admir-
ing, books on Afro-southern song and narrative. He had inadequate feel
for tone and practically no understanding of common syntax, Hurston
complained.^43 Certainly Odum’s turn from cultural anthropology to social
ecology was fortunate for all. Still, on the subject of color, justice, and har-
mony, one will remember that Hurston (if we are to accept Idella Parker’s
word) was sent to sleep among Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s hirelings, while
the Odums welcomed black peers under their own roof. Howard had al-
ready been active in a moderate interracial group devoted to maintaining
contact and conversation across the racial divide: the Commission on Inter-
racial Cooperation, founded in . Ultimately, during the s, he be-
came president of its successor organization, which survives, the Southern
Regional Council.
Ironically, too, Howard W. Odum was ever the agrarian, more legiti-
mately, one must say, than Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and other
Agrarians of the late s and s. Agrarianism may be a formal philoso-
phy and/or political position about the rural and agricultural foundations