Howard W. Odum and American Regionalism

AT THE time of his death in November of 1954, Howard Odum was working full time on the book, Mid-Century South: The New Southern Regions of the United States. This book was conceived as successor to his classic Southern Regions of the United States, published in 1936. Indeed, the major theme of the new book is the change in the South since 1930. Dr. Odum had finished first drafts of about half of the chapters of Mid-Century South, and, of course, had assembled and classified much material on the remaining chapters. Virtually all the returns were in and he had arrived rather firmly at conclusions regarding the South in the 1950's. In the course of this and other work, he had in recent years reexamined the premises of the regional approach to the study of human society in general and to American society in particular and had found them still sound.' Odum's first conclusion with respect to the midcentury South was that "the main emphasis in any definitive work on the South must now and henceforth be primarily upon the southern States redefined in the framework of the regional structure of the total American culture . .. for this midcentury South is for the first time a New South oriented to the needs of a more perfect union and to such interregional interaction as to contribute powerfully to the strength and leadership of the Nation made stronger by the enrichment and integration of all its divergent regions." Odum wrote these words in the opening paragraph of the drafts of the new book, and with great pleasure, for it was his fondest dream that the South would rejoin the Union, discarding not only its pathologies of ideological separatism, but its pathologies in economics, institutional services, and in human development. Those familiar with his work will recall that ever and again he stated that regionalism was something quite different from sectionalism, and perhaps even went beyond the call of science in doing so. Because Odum's statement on the mid-century South will appear, perhaps, to many current sociologists to be overstepping the bounds of sociological analysis in favor of leading toward a desired and desirable end, it is well to say a few words about his approach to sociology. These words, fortunately, appear in his last major published work, "Folk Sociology As a Subject Field for the Historical Study of Total Human Society and the Empirical Study of Group Behavior."2 This paper contains his considered, most mature thinking. His major guideposts for sociological analysis are found in the two parts of the title quoted above. They were elaborated in the article as: (1) "the historical study of total human society in process"; and (2) "the empirical study of group behavior in interaction." Odum believed in sound theory as the most practical thing in the world and in scientific method. For him more than most, these were primarily tools whose use was to be ever informed by an awareness of the goals: "the demand for expanding knowledge for understanding contemporary society and for resolving the critical ' A complete bioliography of Howard W. Odum was published in Social Forces, 33 (March 1955), pp. 209217. Because the greater part of the references in the bibliography are relevant to this paper, no attempt is made to reproduce them herein. 2 Howard W. Odum, "Folk Sociology As a Subject Field for the Historical Study of Total Human Society and the Empirical Study of Group Behavior," Social Forces, 31 (March 1953), 192-223.