Purpose and Tradition in Southern Rural Society: A Point of View for Research

HE rural peoples of the United States and T of the world have in common the negative fact that they do not live in cities, but there the similarity between them ends. In a country as diverse as our country is, it is difficult to account for our assumption of rural homogeneity. Perhaps it developed as a consequence of our preoccupation with the rural-urban contrast, a preoccupation which has robbed rural sociology of much of the human interest which rightfully belongs to the study of so varied and colorful a subject matter. It was the rise of the city that gave point and content to the concept "rural" as a contrast conception and perhaps induced the illusion of rural homogeneity. We have explored this contrast to our profit but the further progress of rural sociology would seem to call for more comparative study of rural societies themselves. Most rural societies rest upon an agricultural economy of some sort. Yet a common dependence upon agriculture, and even upon the same crops, leaves rural life far from standardized. The same plant crops go through practically the same processes of maturation wherever they are grown, but the social traditions which surround the growing may and do vary widely from society to society. On the other hand, similar traditions may characterize an agricultural society and an industrial society or a mining society.' But whatever the existing traditional patterns are they plead for themselves and resist change.2 They must be isolated and brought under some measure of control, however, if the social and economic problems which are rooted in them are to be brought under control. It is not enough to relegate the observation of traditional patterns to a footnote as something merely quaint and interesting while we discourse on the agricultural problems of how to grow more and better cotton and tobacco and cows. Not only must we become more sensitively aware of the presence of cultural and traditional factors operating in social situations but we must consider and constantly reconsider better methods for screening out these factors and subjecting them to analysis. We must know what they are, how they originated, and how they developed before we can map out very effective programs for their control and change. To this end it seems important that rural sociologists apply themselves more emphatically than they have heretofore to the historical analysis and comparative study of rural societies. These reflections are occasioned by the recent reading of a symposium volume edited by Ralph Wood and entitled The Pennsylvania Germans.3 To one reared in the plantation South the contrasts pointed up by the various chapters are very enlightening. Kollmorgen's chapter on "The Pennsylvania German Farmer" is especially interesting to a Southerner. Indirectly it teaches almost as much about the plantation South as it does directly about the rural society of the Germans in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The Germans who settled in Pennsylvania before the Revolution were members of a homogeneous cultural group. They were isolated from their neighbors by the barrier of language but religious affiliation was and remains the best index of separateness. Traditional Pennsylvania German agriculture was based upon the family farm intensively cultivated and highly diversified. In this system of society, livelihood was the principal norm of effort and planning; profits had only a secondary standing. The Pennsylvania German farmer "looked upon his calling as a preferred way of life and not primarily as a commercial occupa* Read before the ninth annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, Georgia, May 18, 1946. l During the course of his discussion of the characteristics of the Red River country in the South, J. Russell Smith remarked, "The organization of the plantation is much like that of a coal mine." North America (New York, 1925), p. 249. 2 Although the old-line tobacco farmer of North Carolina is the peer of tobacco farmers anywhere he is not finding it easy to adjust to the new methods required in the culture of Turkish tobacco. He is less successful in this field than farmers with no previous experience in growing tobacco. I am indebted to Mr. F. R. Darkis of Duke University for this information. 3Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942.