Dr. Odum has devoted his life to the study of Southern
resources (both human and physical) and the most productive means of employing
them. In an unused sense of the term, therefore, he is a professional
Southerner. His investigations, conducted from the stronghold of the Southern
academic conscience, the University of North Carolina, have made him one of the
great men of American sociology. The effect of his studies on the South is
growing; his is one of the most beneficent and changing influences at work in
the Southern regions.
From such a man—humane, steadfast and tireless in the
gathering of vital data about the most tumultuous of our sections—any book is
welcome. This one has been eagerly awaited, for it promised to be a synthesis
of Dr. Odum’s work. It is disappointing to have to report that, despite many
enlightening passages, “The Way of the South” seems more a diffusion than a
synthesis of his ideas. He has tried, unfortunately, to combine the
Whitmanesque manner of his novels (“Rainbow Round My Shoulder” is the best
remembered) with the plodding, repetitious approach of such systematic works as
“American Regionalism.” As he points out in his final chapter, he has used
“freely both form and substance from previous writings.” The substance is
integrated enough; the form, so curiously mixed, makes difficult and
occasionally irritating reading.
But the book’s unevenness has a deeper source. Toward the
close “The Way of the South” exhibits a discouragement at odds with Dr. Odum’s
earlier sober optimism. The cause of his dismay is the sudden renewal of bitter
ideological friction between North and South. He is in evident agreement with
an unnamed Southern writer whom he quotes as saying: “My belief is that people
in other sections are beginning to regard the South with cold distaste that is
worse than hatred.” An immediate emotional tension, rather than a considered
judgement, must be responsible for the declaration, given virtually without
preparations, that “it is not possible to approximate the balanced culture
necessary to guarantee the Negro equal opportunity in America in any other way
than through the migration from the South to all other regions of perhaps
one-half its total Negro population.”
Directly afterward Dr. Odum acknowledges that he considers
“such a program of planned migration” unrealistic. But he goes on to say that
“such a program must be faced frankly and something of its equivalent must be
planned if there is to be anything like the balance and equilibrium in this
area of Negro-white relationships in the United States, and if stark tragedy is
to be avoided in the present trends.” Even in a book devoted largely to
recapitulations, it is astonishing that Dr. Odum’s entire discussion of
“planned voluntary migration” is only about as long as a newspaper editorial.
Obviously, Dr. Odum feels that the need for social peace between North and
South is overwhelmingly urgent—so urgent as to plunge him into what a lesser
man might be called loose thinking.
The wave of criticism against Southern mores would appear to
have had consequences that the critics did not foresee. In more detached
moments Dr. Odum is amiably aware that the northern portion of the United
States seldom has anything on its own conscience and only confesses other
people’s sins. It is clear, however, that he is disheartened by the current
intensity of inter-regional conflicts.
Throughout most of the book Dr. Odum is explaining the South
rather than seeking panaceas for conflicts between the sections. He is not an
apologist for the South; he is an analyst. In the role of investigator, he is
without equal. No one is a surer guide to the complex of forces that have
produced the region’s “biracial culture.” And no one, when intra-sectional
planning is under discussion, is less prejudiced and more clear-sighted. His
discouragement, it is hoped, is only temporary. But it is there, and it cannot
be ignored by those who, like himself, dream of bringing about “the regional
equality and balance of America.”
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