Welcome to Eclectic offers long-form ruminations on the diverse modern South, education, sustainability, and social justice.

As 2024 closed out, I found myself capping off a nearly two-year stretch of vigorous reading with John Egerton’s The Americanization of Dixie from 1974. I had never read this one, though its subject matter should have prompted me to do so long ago. Last year was the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, an event that went largely unmarked. 

Egerton’s now-classic book is a top-notch journalist’s examination of the South, post-Civil Rights. His opening chapter carries us to Miami, to a convention of Southern historians. This event gives him a chance to wax philosophic about the state of the South and to remark that this kind of gathering is only possible because of the idea of Southern exceptionalism. (He doesn’t use that term, but that’s what he’s talking about.) If Southerners didn’t view ourselves as distinctive from other Americans, there would be no Southern writers, Southern historians, etc. After that, his expository prose carries us all over the South with overarching topics serving as the organizational structure.

The first of these chapters discusses “Agriculture,” followed by one about “Land.” That initial discussion features a generational small farmer who is being bested by corporate operations, yet he still works to create the circumstances for himself and his children to keep their farm going. The guy is lobbying and organizing, all the things. However, even Egerton acknowledges, he was beaten before he ever began. That theme continues in chapter two as we read about the negative effects of a Tennessee Valley Authority public works project that did not respect the local people, their values, and their heritage when creating a huge recreation area— basically, a massive park. This time, instead of providing flood control or electricity to the countryside, the government had utilized the TVA, the Army’s Corps of Engineers, and other agencies to push aside those who didn’t want to be moved, so city folks on vacation could play outdoors. Near the end of his description of what the TVA did, Egerton wrote this:

The pervasive malaise of so many Americans today seems somehow how tied to a feeling of rootlessness. Family ties are weaker, the past is irretrievable, the future seems uncontrollable, if not unattainable. Identity is the holy grail, the precious thing all seek but few find, and the sense of community is lost and lamented. 

Back in 1974, he could scarcely have imagined our 21st-century culture, where identity is so important, but his words about displaced Appalachian people in the late 1960s and early 1970s sound a lot like modern times. Today, instead of folkways and family land, it’s screen addiction, political tribalism, and economic inequality, but it boils down to the same thing: identity. He also wrote, “What [the TVA project] lacked was the willingness, the desire, to protect the rights of those who wanted to retain a sense of place.” That sounds a lot like modern corporations. The big guys don’t really care what any small group of ordinary people want, and standing in the way of “progress” is a cardinal sin in a Chamber of Commerce worldview.

I’ve done a lot of driving around the South, mostly Alabama, over the last twenty-plus years, and I’ve seen this phenomenon often. My Generation X experience with it wasn’t over physical places so much as social and economic ones. I first realized the power of corporations in the 1990s when both Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million appeared in Montgomery. One by one, a dozen local bookstores were suffocated out of existence, not by the big stores themselves but by the majority of locals choosing to side with “progress.” Our Barnes & Noble ultimately closed in 2009, and the latter became what it is today: a seller of pop-culture toys and novelties, some of which are books. On a broader scale, the most noticeable usurpation was Wal-Mart’s patterned arrival in the South’s small towns. In Alabama, the first store opened in 1979, then the first “superstore” came in 1992. Local businesses have been no match for everything-under-one-roof and the now-infamous “everyday low prices.” It is too late by the time the towns’ people realize what has hit them. Wal-Mart becomes about the only place to shop, and for some, the only place to work . . . for low wages and no health insurance. By the time people start to fight back against a monstrous interloper, the dead weight of corporate enormity is too much, and restarting a local economy is harder than sustaining one. Too many people, who had been the community’s business owners and their valued employees, become disposable wage-earners in little branded aprons. As a kind of appeasement, the corporations that export their daily dollars to a faraway headquarters then show their love of community by building a park or buying uniforms for the school band. More recently, I’ve noticed that revitalization projects in smaller towns have centered on filling the now-empty downtown storefronts, less on recruiting more outsiders to truck in modernity and convenience. The popularity of renovation shows like Hometown out of Mississippi and Fixer Upper out of Texas is further evidence of the South’s desire to get back what we gave away to yet another kind of carpetbagger.

Getting back to Egerton’s book, those first two chapters are followed by one on “Education.” The year 1974 being what it was, the hyperfocus of the education chapter was integration, using Greenville, South Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; and Nashville, Tennessee as examples. The Swann ruling had come down only a few year earlier, and when the book went to press, Richard Nixon would have still been in The White House. The president had won a second term in 1972 and opposition to integration-related busing was part of his platform. However, despite fifty years now gone, the arguments we read about in the book are basically over the same things as today: equity and opportunity, social class and housing patterns, haves and have nots. Egerton does an excellent job of laying out the intricacies for the average reader, including what was ultimately revealed about the actual practice of integration. Though the issue at hand was race, pulling off that scab showed how deep the wound was, how affluence allowed whites with money to flee, how segregated housing was part of the equation, how black teachers and principals would be demoted or laid off, how politicians built careers on the melee, and last but certainly not least . . . how the North was just as guilty of segregation as the South was. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the Brown ruling could no longer be avoided, the many manifestations of resistance were revealed, including tokenism, feigned compliance, and segregation academies. The chapter even describes (what I’ll call) counterrevolutionary responses among blacks when they realized how badly their communities were being affected through school closures in their neighborhoods, transfers and dismissals of respected teachers, long bus rides for their children, minority status once they got to school, reduced opportunities for parental involvement, and increased suspensions and expulsions. Those were among the realities that resulted from “compromise” plans that started with closing historically black schools whose facilities were in bad shape and ended with shielding most white children from bus rides and minority status. Egerton’s conclusion in the chapter has proven, ultimately, to be spot on: the South had some racially integrated schools for time, but that in itself didn’t accomplish much in the way of true societal progress.

Reading this chapter with five decades of knowledge that Egerton didn’t have back then, I was struck by a few references to the Department of Housing, Education, and Welfare, sometimes called simply HEW. In May 1980, near the end of the one-term Carter administration, HEW became the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Education was established as its own entity. This caught my eye in light of our current president-elect’s assertion as a candidate that he would eliminate the Department of Education, which was followed post-election by the appointment of a secretary who has experience not in education but in professional wrestling. The appointment seems to be a quasi-comedic combination of the white resistance that Egerton described and the circus atmosphere that modern media demands. Perhaps parent-teacher conferences will now be conducted Thunderdome-style behind chain-link in arenas with ringside crowds cheering and jeering.

The problem with this chapter being titled “Education” is that it wasn’t actually about education. It was about busing, integration, Richard Nixon, housing patterns, and post-movement society. Education is the process of teaching and learning, and people often confuse that term and use it to mean the business of operating schools, which is a logistical and sometimes political concern. As a Southerner living and working in the field in a time well after Civil Rights movement, I see that difference, between what people use the term for and what it actually means. I also know that, like John Egerton in this book, too few people who discuss education seem genuinely concerned with education. They seem concerned with administrative and legal issues. Even when an environment is political, and even when people are struggling for opportunities, actual learning is both apolitical and indifferent to all classifications of gender, race, class, geography, etc. Sadly, since the times that Egerton was writing about, the term education has come to be identified not with learning, but with opportunity. That, to me, is one of the worst consequences.

Moving on to the subject of “Industry,” Egerton has “The New Carpetbaggers” as the subtitle for this chapter, which opens with amalgam of facts and figures, including this: “Less than one-fourth of the people in the United States live in the South, but almost half of the nation’s poor live there.” The introduction is followed by a vague history of boosterism, from Henry Grady to the Sunbelt, which seems to rely heavily upon a reader’s base knowledge. His narrative centers on the idea that the South needed the injection of Northern capital, but it also lost its character when poverty and rural isolation were somewhat remedied. Then, he takes hard turn and devotes most of the chapter to an over-long story about his businessman friend – a sales manager for national corporation – whose rambling tale of international business points to the entire American economy being bullshit. All of this is protected by pseudonyms, and much of it has nothing to do with the South. His point – I guess – is that the South of the early 1970s was the then-current place where corporate colonization and exploitation were occurring. Then two pages later, the chapter is done. I kept reading, reached the end, and thought, That’s what you decided to write in your chapter on Southern industry? Three-quarters of the word count is so-called Bill Robertson’s apologia for becoming rich and successful through a bogus system that fills the world with cheap garbage products by greasing the palms of everyone he can.

To contrast, there are better explorations of this subject. In The Selling of the South, historian James C. Cobb lays out a long and detailed (and much better) explanation of the South’s Depression-era move toward industrialization, via Mississippi’s BAWI (Balancing Agriculture With Industry) program. This effort, beginning in 1936, sought to coax outside investors with the incentives model that Egerton touches on: free infrastructure, tax breaks, a pool of cheap labor, and government-run employee training. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this was still the paradigm— sadly, it still is. The good news is that this idea brought lots of jobs to the South over the decades. The bad news is that corporations often exploit the tax breaks end and use up the infrastructure then leave an empty facility and spiking unemployment. Drive around the rural South and into the small towns, and there they’ll be: small to mid-sized factories, shuttered and half-hidden behind kudzu and tall grass, with crumbling parking lots and silent loading docks. Sometimes, through the filthy, yellowed windows, you can still see broken office furniture and cardboard boxes full of God-knows-what. This chapter in Egerton’s book carries Cobb’s story forward, into the 1970s, and is basically talking about what happened when international businessman from the military-industrial complex got hold of the South in their own way.

In this discussion, Egerton also remarks briefly upon the Agrarians, and though that group is often decried today as a gaggle of racists and neophobes, this is exactly the kind of thing they warned against. The South, they thought, would be at its best if the region remained rural and bucolic, avoiding industry. Well, they lost the culture war, badly. BAWI was implemented a few years after their manifesto I’ll Take my Stand was published in 1930. Yet, in ways, the Agrarians were right. Today, we have what Pope Francis calls a “throwaway culture,” and most honest people acknowledge that buying crap, discarding that crap, then buying more crap is a practice that is destroying the planet . . . and our humanity. Fifty years ago, guys like “Bill Robertson” may have felt bad about getting rich from peddling cheap goods and making shady deals, but that didn’t stop them. Egerton shares a cautionary tale embedded in his friend’s story, but it wasn’t heeded even by the guy who offered it. No, something was set in motion that has been elevated to juggernaut status. 

Which brings us to “Politics,” a chapter that was much more thorough, far more developed, and infinitely more interesting. This was the very beginning of the period of flux when the “Solid South” of the Democrats was falling apart, yet the Republicans hadn’t yet made the region fully their own. The early pages are devoted to Richard Nixon, whose Southern Strategy was big news after this 1972 re-election victory. Mid-chapter, he writes about the changing faces of Southern politics as more Southern Republicans and Southern blacks appeared in elective offices. Yet, it was this passage on the actually diversity of the Southern electorate that caught my attention:

The turbulence [of a changing political landscape encompassing affluent whites, poor whites, and all blacks] remains as new factions emerge and splinter— there are old-line conservative Democrats, New Deal liberals, old-guard Republicans, progressive urban Republicans, populist Democrats, Wallaceites, women and youth groups that nearly constitute independent forces, blacks Democrats, black third-party groups, and even blacks for Nixon. All that is reflective of national trends, and it is fractious and confusing, but in the South, at least, it is certainly more to be desired than the monolithic rigidity of one-party rule.

Though the individual groups that Egerton named have changed, there are just as many kinds of Southern voters today. I know people who can articulate a sophisticated understanding of policy and call themselves “tax and spend liberals” when asked about political affiliations. I know others who can only spout one word: “conservative.” Another change is that we now have a lot more populist Republicans, since Donald Trump altered the make-up of the party. But it’s that latter sentence that couldn’t be any more true. While states like Georgia and North Carolina do have something resembling two-party politics, most Southern states have returned to “the monolithic rigidity of one-party rule.” And that stinks. 

Another remarkable passage within this chapter is Egerton’s description of the populist voter, back then considered a third-party “Wallace voter.” The description, which spans a little over a page – thus, preventing me from reproducing the whole thing here – is very, very similar to a Trump voter of today. He describes “the average American,” a white working-class man who feels “intimidated and victimized by bigness,” i.e. corporations, the federal government, major cities. He considers himself “conservative” and “old-fashioned.” This voter’s male-centered, white-focused values center on a particular formula of patriotism, hard work, and intolerance of countercultural forces, like social justice protestors and rebellious youth. His other foes are the ones who fashion his life with their unseen policies and practices, like bankers, union leaders, politicians, and intellectuals. In short, this guy (and probably his wife and friends) feels attacked from all sides, believing that the rich and powerful are out to railroad him and that the strange, the poor, and the non-whites are trying to destroy everything he understands. This may have been the Wallace voter in the early 1970s, but it is definitely also the Southern populist Republican voter of the 2010s to mid-2020s.

Egerton didn’t have an answer for the quandaries he described but still did an excellent job of elucidating the reality on the ground. In the South, we are more complex than the monikers of red or purple states. (Right now, there are no blue Southern states.) We’ve got as many diverse interests now as we had then. Look around the South today, and you won’t find many New Deal liberals, but you will find progressive millennials who are taking their political cues from a nationalized dialogue on social media, not from local ideas. Egerton also didn’t list immigrants, and they’re a whole new political force now— and by immigrant, I mean Latino laborers and South Asian shop owners just like I mean military retirees who came for the weather and the golf, college professors who won’t stay long, and the foreign-born managers of automotive plants. These groups of people, whose presence was barely felt in previous decades, are now affecting Southern culture and politics. And the longer we remain under this current incarnation of one-party rule, the longer we’ll be holding ourselves back with a provincial/populist outlook that is based on fear and resentment. Southern society is becoming more and more diverse, while our politics disables the benefits of that trend.

Next, in “Cities,” Egerton makes the same flub that he did in “Industry.” He spent the whole damn chapter talking about Columbia, South Carolina and barely anything else. Nothing against Columbia, but I can’t think of a single Southern city that’s indicative of most Southern cities. However, the writer answered my concerns somewhat with this:

Something is happening in Columbia – something not unlike what is happening in cities all over the nation – that confuses and frustrates and discourages people, segregationists and integrationists and separatists alike. There are so many manifestations of the malaise that it is almost impossible to describe it, but what is happening is something like this: desegregation has arrived, but inequality persists, and so do friction and hostility and discord. Neither those who sought the demise of segregation nor those who resisted it are pleased with what is now taking place.

To elaborate, other portions of the chapter get into the nuances of the school board and the local chamber, school choice and dissatisfaction. Connecting these facts to the theme of Americanization, we learn that there were 153 cities of 100,000 people or more in the US, and forty-six of them were in the South. Some were already experiencing “runaway growth,” like Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta. Which would mean that the problems won’t be fixed, they’ll just be bigger and more concentrated.

Finally, in “Culture,” Egerton returns to his winning ways, covering a lot of material in relatively few pages. He starts with the venomous writings of HL Mencken and college football at Ole Miss, then moves on to countercultural communes like Koinonia and The Farm, then flows seamlessly into the Southern Baptists. He opens his chapter with a refutation of Mencken’s “Sahara of the Bozarts” comments, reminding his readers that the elder writer’s standards were based on features that the South doesn’t have much of and doesn’t really care to, like museums and symphonies. No, Southern culture is rich and deep and intricate, and it is not based on the same values as wealthy cities in the North. We meet the Goat Man, a traveling preacher who lives wherever he stops in his wagon, and we spend some time with boxer Joe Frazier’s decision to buy his mother a former cotton plantation. Egerton gives us glimpses into the South’s younger generations, some of whom have become interested in charismatic new denominations to become “Jesus freaks.” Finally, he lands on the ways that national media and entertainment – movies, music, TV – have affected Southerners. Down here, folks were watching Clockwork Orange just like they were anywhere else, and then there’s the region’s big export: country music, which was rising steadily in popularity all over the nation. Sadly, that great country music from the 1970s, which was all about working-class people and values, has turned into one big marketing scheme today. (How we went from Merle Haggard to Jason Aldean . . . I’ll never understand.)

The epilogue, which is pretty ephemeral, switches back and forth between a narrative of the writer’s trip home (which is noted in regular font) and paragraph-long fits and snatches of ideas that summarize his findings (which are noted in italics). His point in all of it seems to be that the massive degree of change experienced by the South in the 1950s and ’60s was having results that were more like shuffling the deck than garnering a winning hand. Certainly, the region was becoming less exceptional and more mainstream, but the effects were not all positive, even for the people who sought and got the changes.

Having been born the same year that this book was published, my entire life has been a witness to the aftermath of what John Egerton described here. I grew up shelling peas for my grandmother and also watching MTV. I saw strip-mall developers take over every patch of land that they could purchase during the same years that George Wallace was in the governor’s mansion, a few miles from my house. Attending a Southern Baptist church was, for me, just “church,” and the songs of “crossover” country acts, like Kenny Rogers, were part of the soundtrack for my youth. I attended an integrated elementary school then a segregation academy. I recognized much of what was written in The Americanization of Dixie. Yet, it was strange to read that, in these years, people were already decrying the way that life has become less personal, less intimate, because I remember knowing all of my neighbors. (I certainly don’t today.) Even though, I was Americanized by the forces that Egerton mentions in the “Culture” chapter – music, movies, and TV – I was still a Southerner. And still am. In 2024, I find it hard to live a daily life where people routinely don’t speak to each other, where children don’t do chores, and where a coffee shop means “progress.” But that’s what has happened . . . during the Americanization of Dixie.