he conceded that ‘‘one must admit that much that is distinctive of southern
culture, its plantation system, its sectionalism, its agricultural life, its rural
practices, has developed as a kind of complex around the cotton plant,’’
whose culture the South’s climate and soils had invited.^46 Cultivation of
cotton (most deterministic of all southern commodities, perhaps) had per-
petuated slavery and caused sharecropping and the impoverishment of
both people and the landscape. By Vance’s time cotton culture had contrib-
uted enormously to an environmental and social crisis. No less than Pare
Lorentz’sThe Riveralmost a decade later, Vance’s first agrarian book dem-
onstrated the causative interrelationships between weather, soils, and hu-
man economic activity.
AfterHuman Factors, Vance undertook a more comprehensive environ-
mental study of the region.Human Geography of the South: A Study in Re-
gional Resources and Human Adequacy(also published by the University of
North Carolina Press) appeared in . More than pages long, this
work rivals Odum’s opus of four years later in scope. Encompassing all agri-
cultural subregions, it demonstrated correlations between topography and
‘‘culture’’ (broadly defined). It also described industries, subclimates, and
human diets in comparative perspective, and finally, it presented Vance’s
grim assessment of the condition and future of ‘‘folk’’ culture in the South.
Only three years later, in , Vance broached an issue he had not em-
phasized before, oddly enough. This was the South’s persisting overproduc-
tion of children during the great interwar crisis. His memorable essay ‘‘Is
Agrarianism for Farmers?’’ appeared inSouthern Reviewand addressed the
Depression-era ‘‘back to the land’’ movement. The press had reported that
numbers of rural southern migrants to the industrial North, thrown out of
jobs and unable to pay rent, had flocked back south, often to their fami-
lies, to take up farming again. Vance and other Regionalists already under-
stood that there was seldom room for more farm laborers and that clearing
more land for them resulted in more soil erosion and exhaustion. More im-
mediately, though, Vance was annoyed by some of the Nashville Agrarians’
celebration of the phenomenon. His essay observed the timeless dilemma
of rural proprietors: generational succession and the subdivision of farms
that were already too small. ‘‘Southern farmers,’’ he wrote, should ‘‘take a
look at the French peasant,’’ for whom the ‘‘farm is a permanent thing to
be tended with loving care and handed down undivided.’’ The French ideal
scenario was ‘‘to rear to adulthood two children, preferably one son who will
inherit the family domain and one daughter who will marry a neighbor’s
son who will also inherit.’’ Then ‘‘no child of his will have to till another’s