He began his close relationship with the federal government when President Hoover named him to the Research Commission on Social Trends. But it was in 1936 that Professor Odum issued his most comprehensive study, Southern Regions of the United States, a text of more than six hundred pages that became the New Deal’s major resource for regional planning. One of his students, journalist Gerald W. Johnson, translated the massive study into a readable and popular book, momentously titled The Wasted Land. Another star student, Arthur Raper, wrote the definitive work on southern farm tenancy, and served as a principal researcher for the Division of Farm Population and Rural Welfare within the Bureau of Agricultural Economics. Odum collaborated with Roy Stryker of the FSA’s photographic unit in overseeing a three-year sociological project of thirteen counties in North Carolina and Virginia.46
The real strength of Odum’s work came from the amount of information he amassed. He was able to prove that the South had surrendered ninety-seven million acres to erosion (an area larger than the two Carolinas and Georgia); it had squandered the chances of millions of people by tolerating poverty and illiteracy; and it had ignored human potential by refusing to provide technological training, or even basic services, to its people. The overwhelming power of Odum’s data undercut (what Odum himself called) Gone with the Wind nostalgia—the collective self-image elite southerners had cultivated. Here was one southerner who wanted to see some “sincere, courageous telling of the truth about the South.” He was “tired of the defense complex,” he said, and the unending ridicule, complacency, ignorance, and, above all, the poverty. The greatest virtue of Southern Regions was its quantitative weight and its objective outlook. As the southern historian Broadus Mitchell insisted at the same time, “The South does not need defense, but exposition.”47
The primary target of Odum’s research was sectionalism’s destructive legacy. Mitchell interpreted Odum in such a way as to say that there was no longer a justification for using Yankee oppression for the South’s refusal to change. To Odum, there were “many Souths”; what was needed now was a regional vision. As a cattle breeder, he compared the sectional dictate to “cultural inbreeding,” and to the “stagnation” that came from resisting the “cross-fertilization of ideas” and by refusing to engage with those beyond one’s state. When he looked at the Tennessee Valley Authority, he saw unmistakably the most successful of New Deal projects in regional planning; the TVA had harnessed the power of seven monumental dams, coordinating among seven states and employing nearly ten thousand people in an area that previously had suffered under tremendous poverty. Odum said he hoped the TVA “would constitute the 49th State.” The straitjacket of states’ rights had suffocated southern progress long enough.48
Odum was right about the TVA. It was a shining example of positive planning. Its dams alone were marvels of engineering, elegant and modern architectural wonders. Intelligent management resulted in soil conservation; flood, malaria, and pollution control; reforestation; and improved fertilization—all sensible land-use strategies. The TVA led to well-designed communities that supported libraries and health and recreation facilities—everything that Wilson had prescribed for the homestead villages. There were training centers in agriculture, marketing, automotive and electrical repair, mechanical work and metalwork; there were classes in engineering and mathematics at nearby colleges, plus unprecedented opportunities for adult education. A bookmobile carried libraries to workers and their families.49
Odum knew it would be extremely difficult to dislodge cultural prejudices. In 1938, he sent questionnaires to distinguished academics across the country, asking each to define what “poor white” meant to him. Where and when did they first hear the term? he wanted to know. Were there state and regional differences in how the term was used? Where did they think the term originated? What were its distinctive features? What other terms were prevalent that carried similar meaning?50
The responses revealed how slippery the label “poor white” could be. While several sociologists said outright that the term was “fuzzy,” a loose example of name-calling, most of Odum’s known forty-six respondents listed as many negative attributes associated with poor whites as came to mind. The most popular adjective was “shiftless.” It was connected to a string of synonyms: purposeless, hand to mouth, lazy, unambitious, no account, no desire to improve themselves, inertia. All these descriptions conflated the unwillingness to work with some innate character flaw.51
“Shiftless” was not a new word. Chronicling his southern tour in the 1850s, Frederick Law Olmsted had used it to categorize slothful slaveowners and slaves alike. It was a favorite word among New Englanders in describing bad farmers, and was a common reproach toward tavernkeepers and other immoral characters who congregated in dens with lowly laborers. By Theodore Roosevelt’s time it was the word of choice in legislation that punished deserting husbands; “shiftlessness” was a major symptom in the eugenicist’s diagnosis of the degenerate. And it was of course second nature to vagrants and hoboes. W. J. Cash, in The Mind of the South (1941), portrayed a shiftless poor white sitting under a tree, holding a jug and surrounded by his hounds, while his wife and children were out working the fields with a kind of “lackadaisical digging.”52
Social proximity to blacks was the second most popular explanation for their association with shiftlessness. In 1929, with his appearance in the movie Hearts in Dixie, the very visible African American actor known as Stepin Fetchit began a film career in which he popularized for an entire generation the crude stereotype of laziness suggested by his on-screen name. In his response to Odum on poor whites, Ira de A. Reid, a black scholar at Atlanta University, recalled that when he was growing up, “race etiquette” required that he never address a “poor white” with that name, unless he expected to be called “nigger” in return. For Reid, “white trash,” “poor whites,” and “niggers” all conveyed the same social stigma.53
Many of Odum’s respondents claimed that the designation “po’ white trash” derived from black vernacular. According to a Mississippian, when whites of the upper or middle class used it, they qualified it with “as blacks would say.” Odum’s respondents noted that poor whites lived near poor black neighborhoods, and it was virtually impossible to distinguish their dwellings. To some middle-class whites, the slight elevation in status of poor whites over poor blacks was but an empty courtesy. From outside the South, in Cincinnati, one sociologist wrote Odum that mountain whites were called “briar hoppers” and subject to de facto segregation just as urban blacks were. (“Briar hoppers” was a variation on the old English slur of “bogtrotters,” aimed at the Irish.)54