of wealth and the spiritual and social advantages of rural life. Agrarian-
ism may also be merely a closely related sentiment. The Agrarians and the
Regionalists shared the latter. Regionalists—Odum, Rupert Vance, Arthur
Raper, Gerald Johnson, Margaret Jarman Hagood, and others—seemed to
accept the agrarian premise regarding the origins of wealth even as they
unmasked the legends of bucolic bliss and welcomed machines and indus-
tries as opportunities for unhappy peasants’ escape.^44 Odum always cher-
ished his farmboy origins and heritage, and in Chapel Hill he assumed a
rural persona parallel to the academic one. Outside town he maintained a
farm where he bred Jersey dairy cattle—and quite successfully. The Ameri-
can Jersey Cattle Club once conferred upon him the Master Breeders Award,
and Howard also served as president of the North Carolina Jersey Cattle-
men’s Association. Such a tiny agrarian universe as his offers timely, almost
perfect poetics, I think: The Odum farm was not extensive in scope. Little
ground cover was disturbed, because cows consume principally grasses,
which hold the soil. And while unproductive bulls and cows were doubt-
lessly sent to the abattoir, breeding-for-dairy and dairying themselves seem
worthy and moral uses of animals, assuming (from Genesis) that humans
are entitled to dominate and exploit them.
InSouthern Regions, Odum declared early on, ‘‘In fine and in sum, the
agrarian problem isthe region, for better or for worse.’’^45 By this he meant,
of course, not only a premodern land tenure system and low commodity
prices but high birthrates, poor education, racial discrimination, politics
variously feudal and demagogic, and not least, poor land. Odum was not
the first of the Regionalists, however, to engage the ‘‘agrarian problem.’’
In the University of North Carolina Press published Rupert Vance’s
superlativeHuman Factors in Cotton Culture: A Study in the Social Geogra-
phy of the American South. Farm-raised himself, like Odum, Vance was a be-
loved fixture in Chapel Hill for many years. Opposite his volume’s title page
is a beauteous, color-coded foldout map titled ‘‘Soil Regions of the Cotton
Belt’’ southeast of latitude ° and longitude °. From the preface on-
ward, Vance anticipated much of the best, I think, of agro-ecological his-
toriography during the last two decades of the twentieth century. One of
his consultants was the most prominent historian of the South at the time,
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips of Yale, who began his own last book,Life and Labor
in the Old South, also published in , with the famous determinism, ‘‘Let
us begin by discussing the weather, for that has been the chief agency in
making the South distinctive.’’ Vance himself rejected determinism in the
abstract; yet in the course of explaining his methodology and conclusions,