Minorities in Southern Television: Visibility But Little Control

By Faye McDonald Smith

Vol. 1, No. 10, 1979, pp. 3,26-29

The days are over – pretty much – when Black people would do a double take when they turned on the television set and saw one of their own as a news reporter. They may have squinted their eyes and perked up their ears to look and listen a bit more intently. They were, after all, “checking out” the new personality, and they wanted to make sure that every hair was in place and every word in syntax. For what that person said and did, how he or she looked and acted, was somewhat representative of Black people in general. If the reporter flubbed it, there was a collective sigh of embarrassment; if he or she performed favorably, there was that communal sense of pride, right-on and a job well done.

Those days are over pretty much. Now, Black news reporters and anchor people are not an uncommon lot; and while there are still some television stations which have yet to embark upon this new frontier, in recent years there has been a significant increase in on-air Black talent.

Due largely to FCC and EEOC rulings, local television stations have hired more minority reporters, anchor people and program hosts, some of whom have brought strong personalities and higher ratings to the stations. But the old adage “strength in numbers” does not apply here. The increased minority participation amounts to higher visibility on the screen, but little managerial input in the board room – or elsewhere.

A 1977 report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights entitled Window Dressing on the Set: Women and Minorities in Television, made this finding:

“In comparison with their presence in the work force in general, a relatively high proportion of minority females (and to a lesser extent minority males) are employed in visible positions as on-the-air talent. Increased visibility on the screen without comparable representation in decision making positions suggests that, minorities and women serve merely as window dressing.”

In making its report, the Commission used data from 40 major market commercial and public television stations. As a follow-up to that initial report, the Commission released more current data in January of this year in Window Dressing on the Set: an Update. That report cited “no significant increase in the percentages of minorities and women employed as officials and managers in the 40 station sample.” The report further stated that the vast majority of the official and manager positions at the stations were held by White males, and in contrast, “the percentages of Black male and Black female officials and managers are significantly lower than the overall percentages of Black employment.” The percentage

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breakdown of all officials and managers at the stations was defined as such: White males, 64.9%; White females, 21.3%; Black males, 5.2%; Black females, 4.4%; Hispanic males, 1.7%; Hispanic females, 0.8%; other minorities, less than 1.7%.

Another finding from Window Dressing is perhaps even more indicative of the under representation of Blacks in managerial positions. The report cites that although many minorities and women had impressive job titles, their low salaries and locations on organizational charts implied an artificially inflated job status.

Hattie Jackson can attest to that. As program coordinator at WXIATV, the ABC affiliate in Atlanta, Jackson acts as the liaison between the network, the syndicators, and her station.

“In my opinion, sixty percent of Blacks in broadcasting are FCC commitments. My title is, I think. Supposedly, I’m a woman in management, but in essence, I’m considered a secretary. Regardless of how much (Black) people want to believe it, who may say to me ‘you run the programming department,’ I do not have any policy-making power.”

Jackson says she does the majority of the work in the programming department, and that at times her opinion is sought; however, her requests to sit in on department head meetings have been denied. She says she can’t categorically claim racism, because her White counterpart at another Atlanta station has the same problem. Racism or sexism – take your choice. The reluctance on the part of management to afford minorities and women decision making opportunities seems prevalent.

“I know where I want to get in TV,” says Jackson, who states confidently that she will be a program director. “I have a timetable and I know that you cannot change people’s hearts or heads. You must know where you want to go and if it means leaving – then go. I think you have to take a stand; you have to take a risk.”

Black women working in television in the South are making gains in the broadcasting industry, according to a recent study by the Radio and Television News Directors Association. The study indicated that television was far ahead of radio in employment of minority news staffers, and that most of the progress has been made in the South, where minority employment is highest.

The RTNDA study found that seventy-one percent of all television stations reported minority employment, compared to only twenty percent of radio stations. In the South, the statistics were higher, with eighty-three percent of the television stations having minorities on staff, compared to thirty-one percent of the radio outlets. Nearly twenty-five percent of the women working in television news were members of minority groups, and the study applauded “impressive gains” by Black women among the news staffs of the nation’s broadcast stations.

A close look at the job classifications, however, clearly indicates that while Black women are increasing in numbers on broadcast news staffs, they remain far behind in managerial positions. Of the 26,547 employees classified as officials and managers in the RTNDA study, 1,975 are minorities. Of that total, 643 are Black males; 388 Black females.

“It’s true that Black women are hired more often (than Black men), but in terms of moving into managerial positions, perhaps Black men are getting the better shake. However, the situation is so bleak overall, that the difference is miniscule. Less than one half of one percent of Blacks are in real decision making jobs.”

Such is the assessment of William Dilday, general manager of WLBT, the NBC affiliate in Jackson, Miss. The only Black general manager of a VHF station in the U.S., Dilday categorizes “decision making jobs” into three major levels: a) general manager, general sales manager, program director; b) news director, chief engineer, production manager; c) promotion manager, programming manager, news assignment director.

“These people usually control what you see and hear, who’s hired and fired, what vendors are used in the disbursement of funds,” says Dilday.

At WLBT, which has a viewing audience of one million, Dilday has appointed a Black production manager, public service director, children’s program director, and assistant news director. He says he looks for people who are trainable and that if someone’s a good administrator in education, that person could adapt to television administration, or if someone is a good salesperson, then he or she could adapt to television sales.

“With a forty percent Black staff,

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there’s no way all those people were qualified when they walked in the door at WLBT. But they were qualifiable, and that must be considered.”

Dilday attributes the paucity of Blacks in policy making positions to the lack of a true commitment by television management to open up such jobs. He also faults what he calls institutionalized racism.

“We’re fighting against the good ol’ boy network, where Joe Jones will call up Jim Smith to recommend somebody. There’re so few of us in the industry getting those calls and able to refer.”

Perhaps another reason for the dragging of feet by top management to include more Blacks in their ranks is due to a rather nasty and prevalent human trait – greed. People in power tend to hold on to it, are often obsessed by it, and don’t like to share it. In addition, the possibility of younger, aggressive professionals who could take over, and perhaps perform more efficiently, looks as a not-so-distant threat to many television executives. To their way of thinking, it is simply best to restrict the numbers of qualified applicants. The fewer, the better.

And when there are qualified minority applicants to move into managerial positions, the rules of the game often change. In one instance at a television station in a large Southeastern market, the program director left, and the Black woman who had worked as his assistant would have been next in line for the job. She didn’t get it. Instead, the entire programming department was revamped, a former engineer was brought in, and titles and responsibilities switched around.

“I think most of us agree that there ought to be more Black program managers,” says A.R. Van Cantfort, president of the National Association of Television Program Managers and program director of WSB-TV, the NBC Atlanta affiliate.

“We’ve discussed this a number of times at our meetings, and we certainly need to encourage more in that area. However, becoming a program manager just doesn’t happen overnight. I don’t want to overplay the job, but in addition to programming responsibilities, there are many other facets involved, like negotiating contracts, license renewal, handling temperamental talent.”

Ed Jones, newly appointed Black program manager at WDVM Channel 9 in Washington, D.C., agrees with VanCantfort.

“A person must know station operations. He can’t just walk in and say, ‘I want to be a program manager,’ and expect to be trained for it.”

Jones worked at the Washington, D.C., CBS affiliate as an assistant program manager at WSSB-TV in Hartford, Conn. He is one of only two Black program managers in commercial television. John Robinson at WTEV in New Bedford, Mass., is the other.

“We’re lacking Black program managers for the same reason so few minorities are at influential levels in other aspects of business,” says Jones. “There’s a lack of sensitivity to seek out such people and hire them at that level. The entire industry is bad.”

The case for more Black television managers is certainly evident, but at the same time, the positions of those Blacks who do have high visibility – the on-air reporters and anchor persons – should not be taken for granted. Often, a station believes it has met its “minority commitment” with the hiring of one Black personality.

Diana Fallis has worked as a reporter for nearly five years at KTRK, the ABC affiliate in Houston. For the past two years, she has also worked as the week-end anchor.

“I was one of the first Blacks to do so in the Houston market,” says Fallis, and that’s just .week-end. There are no Black anchors in Houston aside from week-end, and Houston has a Black population of well over 400,000.”

The situation in New Orleans does not appear much better, according to Lester Soublat, continuity director for WYES, the city’s public television station.

“New Orleans has a history of old money tied very much to the social scene in the city, and while that doesn’t necessarily dominate politics (as evidenced by a Black mayor), for a city with a 40 percent Black population, we are woefully underrepresented.”

Soublat is responsible for all on air promotion and public service an-

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nouncements, and he says if Black organizations and activities are not getting enough coverage on the commercial stations, he tries to compensate by running their spots more frequently. He says that Blacks need to pool their resources together because “in this city, Blacks don’t have significant management positions or visibility.”

As in many other cities, Black broadcasters in New Orleans have tried to organize to share information on employment opportunities in the industry, and to provide workshops, seminars, and mutual support. Some of these groups, such as NOBIC (New Orleans Blacks in Communications) were proven to have some impact. When it was rumored that one of the local stations wanted to fire a Black newscaster, NOBIC ran a discreet campaign to let the station management know that the newscaster had strong support in the community, and consequently, NOBIC has been credited with helping to secure the broadcaster’s job.

On-air positions, while not managerial, still need to be maintained and increased, believes Phil Evans, host of a public television program on WYES.

“In a city such as New Orleans with a large Black population, you’d expect to see a reflection of this on the air. Management would argue that while it’s true the city proper is predominantly Black, when you consider the signal range of the television station, Whites make up the majority of the viewing audience. And they believe this justifies low minority representation.”

In addition to his role as a host, Evans is also the producer and project director of “Schools: Insight” a $120,000 federally funded program which provides information to help Louisiana parents and public school systems adjust to desegregation.

Evans says he likes working in public television, and that even though it doesn’t compete with commercial salaries or shatter the ratings books, he thinks public television offers him more of an outlet to expand his talents.

Few may argue that public television provides more creative flexibility than commercial television, but in turn, does public television also offer greater upward mobility for minorities?

“No,” believes Ed Jones of Washington, D.C.’s WDVM. “Once you get beyond the layers of bureaucracy, and really look into the ranks of broadcasting, you’ll find that public television is probably worse. It doesn’t have as much visibility and therefore can get away with more, and just like Congress, the biggest offenders of affirmative action are often those agencies which are supposed to regulate it.”

Current information from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting indicates the paucity of Blacks and other minorities in management positions at public television stations in the Southeast. Based on full time employment data as of March of this year, the CPB survey shows that Whites make up an overwhelming 93.4 percent of all officials and managers. The breakdown by sex and race is as follows: White males, 69.4%; White females, 24%; Black males, 1.9%; Black females, 2.6%; Hispanic males, 1.3%; Hispanic females, 0.4%; other minorities, 0.4%.*

While William Dilday of WLBT is the lone Black general manager of a commercial VHF station in the continental U.S., public television has no Black general manager among its 250-plus stations. And the only minority general manager in public television is John Siqueiros, who heads KCOS in El Paso, a Texas city with a 60 percent Hispanic population.

While commercial television can boast of all of two Black program managers, public television’s record is scarcely better, with only a handful of Black program managers nationwide. In the Southeast, there is only one – Ray Dennell at WLRN, the smaller of the two public television stations in Miami.

Wayne Godwin, director of station relations for PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service, readily admits of the need for Blacks in top station management jobs. But he says that in monitoring minority representation, one should also look at the national policy making boards which govern the local stations. In this instance, PBS can point to Stanley Evans, a Black member of the Board of Regents of the University System of Maine, who is currently head of the PBS Programming Committee.

Godwin also mentions the significant role of the local program producers such as those who work in the area of minority or community affairs.

“I was once a program director,” says Godwin, “and relied heavily on producers for local programmatic content. Although they are removed from station policy, their input in their programs reflects their sensitivity to their audience and we shouldn’t downplay their importance.”

According to Godwin, there’s a “keen sensitivity” in PBS to the need for more minority participation, but that sensitivity has yet to translate itself into more jobs for minorities among the hierarchy. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting recently funded a Minority Task Force Report which was highly critical of public broadcasting’s role in the hiring

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and promotion of minorities. The major conclusion was that minority programming was seriously deficient due to an inadequate number of minorities employed in the system, especially in decision making positions.

Efforts are being made, albeit slowly, to improve the minority employment picture in public broadcasting. The National Association of Educational Broadcasters has set up a personnel service to help minorities in career placements. Last year, the program, known as PACT (People and Careers in Telecommunications) placed 158 individuals, of which thirteen percent were minorities. Most of the jobs were in the midlevel range, from executive program producers to camera operators and other technicians, positions which PACT director Joe Schubert defines as “the working guts of the system.”

The NAEB is also proposing the development of an executive recruitment program which would identify qualified minorities for top managerial positions.

Commercial television is trying to make its thrust towards increased minority ownership, an area which could certainly stand an extra boost. The Storer Broadcasting Company has established a minority ownership fund and Allbritton Communications has had a program in operation since July ’78 which is designed to advise minority groups in purchasing broadcast stations.

While these programs get an E for effort, they don’t measure up as a panacea of any sort. Commercial broadcasters can well afford to transfer some of their obsessive zeal for ratings into initiating fair promotion practices which would move minorities onto the management level – allowing them to fully use their talent and skills.

On the governmental front, the Federal Communications Commission has initiated a policy which permits broadcasters whose licenses have been designated for revocation or renewal the right to sell their properties at a “distress sale” price to parties with significant minority ownership interest. Also the Small Business Administration recently changed its policy to, allow for loan guarantees by banks at up to ninety percent for the purchase of broadcast stations and cable systems. Seven of the first thirty-two loans went to minority applicants.

But these recent and, some may argue, half-hearted efforts should not be considered as compensatory pay back. More sustained and far reaching mechanisms are needed to reverse the years of stone-walling which have blocked qualified minorities from climbing up the managerial ladder.

*Summary information was based on 13 Southeastern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia.

Television producer Faye McDonald Smith works at WETV, Channel Thirty, in Atlanta.

The Progressive Farmer: A Long Row’s Hoeing into Lespedeza

By Cary Fowler

Vol. 1, No. 10, 1979, pp. 4, 29-32

Southern politics in the 1880s was alive with the fever of a native-born Populism. Led by the Southern Alliance (renamed the National Farmers Alliance in 1887), the Populists gained political control of several Southern states and burgeoned into a national organization. Across the South literally hundreds of pro-Alliance newspapers and magazines sprang up with names like Comrade (La.), Toiler’s Friend (Ga.), Weekly Toiler, (Tn.), Revolution (Ga.), People’s Party Paper (Ga.), Southern Mercury (Tx.), and the Weekly Advance(Tx.)

Perhaps the most influential farm magazine in the country today, the Progressive Farmer was founded in the passion of the 1880s by a leader of the National Farmers Alliance. Clearly, its founder, Col. Leonidas Polk, saw the magazine as a weapon in his fight for the farmer. Polk was a native of Anson County, a poor, sun-baked, sand hills county bordering South Carolina in central North Carolina. A soldier, a farmer and a politician, Polk was also the national president of the million member Alliance. Under Polk the Alliance became increasingly critical of both major political parties, calling for reforms such as the nationalization of railroads and the establishment of a commodity credit scheme (later enacted by Congress in 1933). In the Progressive Farmer Polk urged farmers to organize and participate in politics. Meanwhile, Polk, who was North Carolina’s first Commissioner of Agriculture, was himself becoming a prominent and influential political leader on the national scene. Then, without warning, on the eve of the 1892 convention that would have nominated him as the first Populist Party candidate for president, Polk died. With his death, the Progressive Farmer lost its founder, its editor and eventually, much of its passion. The magazine was only six years old.

Hacking at Populist Roots

Progressive Farmer was handed down to Polk’s son-in-law who edited the weekly for the next eleven years until Clarence Poe, a young North Carolinian staff member and four others bought the magazine during hard times in 1903 for $7,500. The memory of Polk must have been fading fast, for the Progressive Farmer was quickly transforming itself into a big-time publishing business. Less than thirty years after Poe took control, Progressive Farmer had gobbled up fifteen other publications and increased its readership over one hundred fold.

Under Poe, Populist politics were drained from the veins of the Progressive Farmer. The magazine’s editorials were nominally well tempered and responsible. Support was given to parity, and the evils of drink and the credit system (“a greased runway to debt and poverty”) were discussed in some detail. But by the 1920s more and more of Poe’s writings were focusing on farming customs and practices. As the nation’s farmers entered one of their bleakest periods in 1929, Poe turned his attention to the virtues of planting lespedeza and red clover in crop rotations. He called for a 13 month calendar of 28 days each. And he began to attack what would endure as his life-long enemy, “one arm farming” – the lopsided emphasis of Southern agriculture on plant production and the shunning of livestock production.

By the end of the 20s, the price of cotton had dropped to a nickel a pound. The depression had arrived. In Washington, new agricultural policies were in the making – policies which would form the basis of our present-day agricultural system. Enacted into law in 1933 under the name of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, these laws encouraged farmers to take land out of production, and offered government payments as incentives to limit production and drive up prices. Land planted to cotton declined from 39 million acres to 29 million acres in one year. The law was a success. The results were disastrous.

Across the South, hundreds of thousands of sharecroppers and tenant farmers were no longer needed and were expelled from the land. At the time, Southern agriculture was unmechanized – fewer than 20% of the nation’s tractors were to be found on Southern farms. Government payments to farmers participating in set-aside programs provided the capital to mechanize and modernize Southern agriculture. And this machinery provided the means to push even more farm laborers off the land. Distribution of income within the farm sector swung heavily towards the big landowners, while small farmers held on by their fingertips.

In the rich, flat Arkansas delta, the dispossessed began to gather in the humid, mosquito-filled night. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers organized meetings near little towns like Tyronza and Marked Tree. Against obvious and overwhelming odds a union – the Southern Tenant Farmers Union – was born, struggling against government policies that were driving people from their land and livelihoods. It was 1934.

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In April, Poe, still the editor of Progressive Farmer, focused the magazine’s lead editorial on the “Six Great Issues Confronting Agriculture.” Sadly, the plight of the tenant was not one. By the middle of the summer, editorials were calling for more family reunions to be held. And by the fall of 1934, the reader was being given editorials with titles such as “Schools Must Educate for Leisure.” For the conscientious tenant there was the “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” column offering tips on how to beautify tenant shacks.

A Fair Shake For The Big Boys,

As the Progressive Farmer became more remote and insensitive to its own roots, it came to identify increasingly with the interests of the big farmer as opposed to the farm worker or small farmer. In 1943 the National Farmers Union was singled out for criticism. “The National Farmers Union might be fairer to our larger farmers.” The editorial went on to chide NFU’s president for asserting (incorrectly?) that “the profits are going to the big farmer.” By 1960 the division between big farmers and farm workers was clearly seen. “How much can wages paid farm workers be increased without decreasing the farmer’s net income?” was the question posed by an editorial entitled, “Farm Workers Union Poses New Problems.” Ten years later the Progressive Farmer was still at work looking out for the interests of the big farmer. It termed the Senate’s vote to limit subsidy payments to a maximum of $20,000 per farmer “a blow to U.S. agriculture” and called on the government to give a “fair shake” to the big farmer.

And Girls …

The Progressive Farmer did not ignore all dispossessed or oppressed peoples, however. Shortly after women won the right to vote, the Progressive Farmer in a column entitled “What Farm Women Need to Know” was advising its women readers that “good taste consists in being inconspicuous.” Today the Progressive Farmer boasts that it was the first farm magazine to hire a trained home economist (read woman) as “Woman’s Editor.” Despite such evidence of progressiveness, Progressive Farmer’s treatment of women has been both scant and traditional. In 1960, Progressive Farmer bestowed its “Woman of the Year” award on a deserving but surely unexpecting recipient. It was the first time the award had been given since 1939 – only the second time it had ever been given. No fewer than

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five men were given “Man [sic]of the Year” awards that year.

And Darkies

Progressive Farmer‘s treatment of Black people has been less scant and more controversial. To its credit Progressive Farmer editorialized against lynching in the 1920s. Lynching it seemed was bad because it gave a poor image to the South. The magazine noted that lynching dissuaded business and industry from locating in the region. At one point, Progressive Farmer even suggested that lynching be declared illegal, as though murder itself were not already illegal enough.

At the same time the reader was being given anti-lynching editorials, the Progressive Farmer was offering up praise for the region’s good race relations. The old plantation owners were described as “sensitive,” “compassionate,” and “humane” masters by one writer, the son of a Confederate colonel. Ironic praise for these good race relations was given to the victims: “A fine spirit of harmony between the two races has always existed in our South Carolina piedmont section. No race riots and few heinous crimes can be traced to the Negroes here.”

By the 1930s standard garden variety racism permeated the magazine. On a single page in a 1933 issue, Blacks were termed “Negro,” “colored,” and “darkie.” An ad for Oliver plows announced, “Here Are The Tools For Your Boys And Mules.” Meanwhile the covers of the magazine celebrated a style of life increasingly out of reach of both Blacks and Whites – ladies with parasols chatting at the gateway of the stereotypical Southern mansion midst graceful live oaks festooned with Spanish moss.

As repugnant as such forms of racism are, they do raise an important, perhaps unresolveable dilemma: how severe can our criticism be of Progressive Farmer‘s racism during a period when this “style” was so commonplace? To what extent can we expect this magazine to have diverged from the norm of its time?

If our criticism of Progressive Farmer‘s stance on racial questions in the twenties and thirties is tempered by our knowledge of the times, so too must their positions in the fifties and sixties be judged in light of the events of those decades. School desegregation dominated the headlines of the fifties. Progressive Farmer was against it, explaining that “Certainly everybody must have noticed how much more quickly a group of Negroes will get to talking, laughing, and joking than a similar group of White people. They are happier in their own group.” In an early sixties’ editorial, Progressive Farmer assured its readers it was “vigorously opposed to school integration.” The ominous title of this particular editorial proved the point: “Abolish Public Schools Only As Last Resort.”

Progressive Farmer had its progressive moments. A 1960 editorial voiced support of voting rights for Blacks. But the editors could not be content with letting such a strong stance stand alone.

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They added that with these new rights would come responsibilities -Blacks would have to solve “some of their problems of morals.”

The remainder of the sixties provided more of the old-fashioned rhetoric on the issues of race. Editorials coming out of Progressive Farmer‘s all White editorial and business staff bore titles like, “Is NAACP a Credit to Negroes?” and “Lawless Chickens Come Home to Riotous Roost.” The first Black person to be pictured on a cover of Progressive Farmer in the sixties appeared in 1965 – two Black farm workers were shown spraying an orchard with pesticides. The following month, Blacks were shown picking vegetables under the watchful eye of a White supervisor. These were Progressive Farmer-approved Blacks – Blacks who had stayed at home to roost, credits to their race.

The Farmer As Consumer

Over the course of Progressive Farmer‘s long, 93-year history, the magazine has lost sight of the interests and needs of the small farmer, not to mention the farm laborer. Ironically, it was Progressive Farmer‘s longtime editor, Clarence Poe, who on the occasion of the magazine’s fortieth birthday, observed that the Progressive Farmer was not and should not be just a “piece of property” or a business, but should strive to be “an educational institution devoted primarily to human service.” But Progressive Farmer was already quickly becoming a big business and destined to be even bigger. As if to prove the point, Emory Cunningham, Progressive Farmer‘s current president and publisher was elevated to that post from his position in the advertising department.

One can witness the big business trend of Progressive Farmer in the content of the magazine itself. As chemicals developed for use in warfare during the two world wars became available for farm use, Progressive Farmer was in the cheering section. The new capitalintensive, ecologically-destructive methods were hardly questioned. To read Progressive Farmer, one wonders how agriculture survived 20,000 years before the introduction of chemicals. “Organic” agriculture (the type all farmers practiced when the magazine was founded) was seen as impossible. “Some fruits would disappear …. Farmers are fed up with sharecropping with insects and other pests,” the editors warned. When Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, appeared suggesting that modern agriculture was backfiring, creating resistant super-pests while poisoning the environment, Progressive Farmer responded with vicious editorials and cartoons portraying a world over-run with insects. “Don’t let them get to first base,” the magazine advised.

Progressive Farmer presented the new chemicals as safe and effective. A Gulf Oil ad for one insecticide even pictured an employee gargling with his company’s product. From the twenties to the present date, ads for farm chemicals have become more and more prominent. The hand that feeds is rarely bitten. Despite genuinely useful articles promoting sound management and technical practices, the magazine continues to promote a form of agriculture increasingly relevant to fewer and fewer farmers – the specialized, large-acreage, wellcapitalized boys.

By the 1960s, Progressive Farmer‘s editorials were concentrating more and more on narrowly defined farm issues and “nonpolitical” agricultural questions. The politics that remained was conservative. As early as the 1940s, Progressive Farmer began urging its

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readers to join the nation’s largest and most conservative farm organization, the Farm Bureau. Farm Bureau platforms were even printed in the magazine. But gradually the lure and comfort of the technological as opposed to the political captured the minds and hearts of the men of Progressive Farmer. The implicit message of decades of Progressive Farmer has been that if farmers will just use the right equipment and the proper chemicals and plant the appropriate crops, all will be well. But, as Progressive Farmer was encouraging its farmers to be good consumers, the farmers were steadily losing control of agriculture to the machinery monopoly, the petro-chemical industry and the various varieties of middlemen. Good markets disappeared. The new market system forced whole regions to specialize in the production of one or two crops like a banana republic. The diversified farm of old was killed . Land prices exploded as speculators entered the market. Farm debt skyrocketed. Farmers got squeezed. When they were down, the government kicked them. And when they organized to fight back, the Progressive Farmer was silent.

Along the way the Progressive Farmer lost sight of its original goals and repudiated its own roots. Worse yet, it seemed willing to poke fun at its history if a buck were to be made. Progressive Farmer‘s review of its own recently published collection of editorials, articles and ads from 75 years of the magazine was entitled, “Nostalgic Book Offers Chuckles.”

Were Colonel Polk still with us, he would not be chuckling. Nor would he be content to ignore the sad lot of the small farmer. Doubtless he would be using Progressive Farmer to spread the advice the Kansas Populist Mary Lease offered to the readers of her newspaper. “Farmers,” she said, “should raise less corn and more hell.”

Cary Fowler works at the Frank Porter Graham Agricultural Training Center in Anson County, North Carolina. He is author of the Graham Center Seed Directory.

Azalea Death Trip: A Journey Through the Land of Southern Living

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 1, No. 10, 1979, pp. 7-10,32

In the beginning,” it is written in Southern Living magazine, “man created Florida “Later on, men got around to creating Puerto Vallarta, where “luxury hotels are beginning to change the red-tile and adobe skyline of this picturesque little fishing village on the west coast of Mexico.” And, somewhere along the way, arose the Land of Oz, a theme park constructed by Grover and Harry Robbins’ Carolina Caribbean Corporation atop North Carolina’s Beech Mountain: “there was this wild top-of-the-world mountain that could overwhelm you, and the Robbins didn’t want to see it forever wasted.”

It is in such sentences of contradiction and divided allegiance that Southern Living reflects the plight of the modern South. To answer the question – What is the sound of six flags waving? – SL’s publisher Emory Cunningham conceived an annual section (“The Future of the South”) in his magazine to seek free enterprise solutions to free enterprise. He wrote: “Convinced that it is absurd to believe that the South’s natural beauty can remain intact without vigilance, we urge the preservation of vulnerable natural attractions that could disappear forever.” Yet the advertisements in Southern Living always suggest something else. One of them, for Bear Paw, a Southern mountain resort, soft-sells: “How to own a piece of God’s country. Before it’s all gone.”

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Commercial Affection

Southern Living sprang full grown from the Progressive Farmer in 1966, the parent providing some 200,000 subscribers and a shower of garden tractors, riding lawn mowers and pickup trucks loaded with fertilizer, herbicides and nursery stock . An affluent market of urban and suburban White families was easily sold to the manufacturers of ovens, carpet, liquor, televisions, automobiles, etc. By 1967, Southern Living led the US magazine field in percentage of advertising revenue gains. In April of 1969 it proudly announced to its 576,000 subscribers the use of 239 tons of paper for that month’s issue. At year’s end, 1975, when Emory Cunningham became the first Southern magazine publisher to receive the publisher of the year award from the Magazine Publishers Association of New York, there were 1,200,000 subscribers and a yearly advertising revenue of eleven million dollars. Presently with its 1,600,000 subscribers, Southern Living is among the top ten monthly magazines in advertising volume.

Turning the pages on thirteen years of back issues provides some insight into the grand and continuing financial success of Southern Living. The magazine caters to the pursuit of leisure in a culture where the skills of outdoor sport and neighborly hospitality have legendary expectations. There are genuine needs here – for play and rest, for travel and the discovery of new peoples and places, for artistic expression in wide variety. Southern Living has seized upon these needs like no other publication.

Ultimately, however, what SL offers its hungry audience is a false fulfillment. In the clever hands of those modern engineers of desire, the admen, human-centered needs are promised satisfaction through saleable goods and a lifestyle of comfortable non-controversy. It is no coincidence that ol’ Alabama boy Emory Cunningham rose to the position of publisher through the ranks of advertising, first as ad

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salesman for the Progressive Farmer, then its ad manager, then to Southern Living as advertising director. “Advertising,” he has written, “is the fuel which powers our journey.”

That the fuel itself can become the chief purpose of the journey has not worried SL‘s engineers. That such a journey requires the exchange of distinctive landscapes, communities and regional cultures for the coins of entropy is evident even in the titles of Southern Living articles: “Where Tradition Meets Its Match,” “Blazing a Trail into Remotest Florida,” “Shopping for Memories,” “Tradition Is For Sale in the Ozarks.” So well-fueled is SL that it is often difficult to find the articles amidst the ads or, having found them, to distinguish between the two. “Why not,” asks the bustling ghost of Henry Grady, “turn the entire South and Southwest into one vast theme park with turnstiles in Houston, Nashville and Richmond?”

A Safari Through Afrikaner Cuisine

“Southern Living,” noted its editor Gary McCalla on the magazine’s tenth anniversary,” reflects only those positive aspects of the South within the scope of our editorial format. Instead of editorializing on what might or could be done, we find positive examples of what has been done and report them.” It is easily agreed that Southern Living is at its best amidst the prospering restaurants, electronic kitchens and prize winning flower gardens of White Southerners of positive aspects. Countless mouths drool monthly over the full page color pinups

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featuring glorious spreads of pickled peaches, slender string beans, stuffed quail, dependable cornbread and freshly hooked trout. Innumerable hands follow SL‘s instructions as to the care of dozens of varieties of camellias and roses. Millions of feet march along the hiking trails to pitch tents in the wildernesses approved by Southern Living. Squadrons of ears know from their reading that all fiddle and guitar players are alike, that the music they make is “bluegrass,” and that the tin flag of Opryland wags happily over the home of the quaint.

Applied to personal relations, this theme of positive aspects is explained by publisher Cunningham: “If a family is about to disintegrate there’s not much chance of them finding real help in a complex explanation of what the problems are. I don’t think a counselor will help. But if you get a couple to start gardening and not get into the marriage thing at all I think the chances of patching things up are a lot better.” In case of horticultural complications, such as the husband who has failed to deliver on a rose garden, the means of patching things up can be shifted to backyard barbecue skills.

Despite such good intentions, however, old fears die hard and Southern Living frequently (yet perhaps only semi-consciously) calls up attitudes older than Dixie and prospects as bogus as the Sun Belt . Racial and sexual stereotyping as well as the privileges of class are easily tied to the tug of a nostalgic heartstring. Selfishness, profit making and ecological violence can be encouraged with the promises of technological deliverance or hidden under a haze of azaleas.

Black folk are consistently ignored by Southern Living. Doubtless they lack the requisite positive aspects. Perhaps they lack the requisite incomes. Possibly they might look a little frightening to the typical subscriber if they came sliding up to poolside dripping wet and in full color in an article entitled “Serenity Among the Southern Pines.”

It took months for the first Black faces to appear in Southern Living. When they did, they belonged to Aunt Jemima on a box of corn meal mix and to a young employee at Aunt Fanny’s cabin, a restaurant where the plantation tradition lives on:

There is no printed menu at your table. A young Negro boy in a white jacket comes up wearing a slate around his neck and chanting the main courses listed thereon…

As you eat happily, several Negro boys put on a singing and dancing show of century-old songs. The waitresses sing when they are not too busy.

A South African vacation advertisement from 1967 invites readers to come to “where language and culture are mirrors of your own.” Ten years later, when a depiction of a tennis-shoed Black kid would have been out of step, an article entitled “Shine Mister” finds its humor in “shoeshine boys with ragged shirts, dirty tennis shoes and eyes that laugh at you. They’re the most loveable little con artists in Mexico.”

In the early 1970’s, within the two pages given to a monthly feature, “This Is Their South,” an occasional Black face or Spanish sounding name finds a segregated space alongside the cameos of nontraditional Southern women – those not chiefly noted for their hostessing or cooking abilities or their beauty contest victories. More recently Blacks seem to be returning to the roles of waiters or Caribbean drummers. Writing in May of 1972, publisher Cunningham noted that “the South has a unique oppor-

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tunity and responsibility to provide moral and ideological leadership for the nation.” But in the thousands of pages which Southern Living has devoted to city living, community development or architectural design, the issues of white flight, integrated neighborhoods and low income housing are conspicuously absent. “Major new choices in residential ownership” turn out to be exclusive communities planned for the affluent and built on a foundation of private profit.

Technological Fetishism

Complete the title of this 1976 Southern Living article: “Making the Most of Your_____________”

1) Marriage

2) Retirement Years

3) Neighborhood

4) Leisure Time

5) Trash Compactor

An Alabama friend told a story several years ago, when these gadgets were first reaching the popular market, about his father’s buying the family a trash masher for Christmas. He introduced the gift by announcing, “You’ve heard of that ecology? Well, this thing here does away with it.” Southern Living too, has heard of ecology. It has frequently won environmental awards from the Discover America Travel Organization, another vehicle fueled by advertising, whose membership includes such citizens of self restraint as the oil companies, travel attractions, transportation companies and accommodations firms.

Reaching out in all directions to embrace every species of mechanical contraption, the harmlessness of “A Blender Does More Than You Think” easily becomes the high technology visit to a delightful South Carolina nuclear reactor described in “An Atomic Kind of Fishing.” Although the title of a January, 1970, article, -It’s a Rocket; It’s a Robot: It’s a Barbecue,” seems to forecast the grim and toasty future awaiting a technocentric South in the post takeoff stage, this story actually turns out to be about the backyard cooking invention of a former NASA electrician. Formed like the offspring of a midnight graveyard rendezvous between a nosecone and the tin man, this device for “controlled fire” is quickly pointed at a familiar target: ” ‘I’ve written instructions three times for my wife,’ says the inventor grinning. ‘And she still doesn’t know how to operate it. She’s afraid of it.’ ”

Ultimately, journalistic visits to space colleges and features on the wives of astronauts turn a romantic. fascination for NASA and the space program into a source of metaphor for Southern Living‘s equally specious benchmarks of success. By April, 1971, editor McCalla was well launched on such a fantasy flight. “To publish a 200 page issue has been a goal of ours for some time,” he wrote. “It is an achievement, we think, somewhat akin to Al Shepard’s suborbital flight in Freedom 7. We’ve still got a long way to go to the moon.”

Azalea Death Trip

If once the Atlanta Journal and its radio station WSB could fairly boast of covering Dixie like the dew, a high tide has risen with Southern Living to cover the coffee tables and night stands, the beauty parlors and barbershops of sixteen states and the District of Columbia. By appealing to Southerners’ traditional love of food, travel, neighborly visiting, gardening, outdoor sports, home care and family life, Southern Living is able to wrap its pursuit of profit with the symbols of the good life. What it offers, however, is a mirage. Not only are historically rich folkways given an eye-catching or sentimental treatment which ultimately trivializes them, but sanction is given to a way of looking at life which eliminates its unpleasant or tragic realities, its historical burdens and its future obligations. Somewhere down the azalea trail, Homer’s lotus eaters come to mind. They too were victims of “positive aspects.”

SIDEBAR: The representations of women through the images and words of Southern Living is a subject too rich for an essay this short. Here, however are a couple of provacative items. First, a sentence worth a thousand pictures: “Charles and Mary Fraser — she was Mary Stone of the Stone Manufacturing Company in Greenville, South Carolina — an attractive brunette, and their two little girls live in a house– cypress, of course,, of a particularly fetching yet functional design on the 12th fairway of the Ocean golf course, one of three in the Sea Pines complex.”(Jan. 1970)

Now and then, this grocery list imitation of life gives way to a purer self-absorption, as in a February, 1971, interview with writer James Dickey:

(Southern Living): What were you flying then

Dickey:F=94’s, C. That’s a jet interceptor. It’s the one with the ring of rockets around the nose. And then when I came back my first boy, Chris, was born. He is married now, and I’m a grandfather. He’s a junior at the University of Virginia.

SL: And your other son is Keven?

Dickey: Yes.

SL: Let’s get your wife’s name in.

Dickey: Maxine. But then, let’s see, when I cameback out of the Service from the Korean War. I went back to Rice and I was still a freshman teacher. I was writing….

Allen Tullos is the editor of this special issue of Southern Changes. A native Alabamian, he currently lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Lillian Smith: The Winner Names the Age

By Rose Gladney

Vol. 1, No. 10, 1979 pp. 11-13

The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings by Lillian Smith. Edited by Michelle Cliff. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1978.

Lillian Smith was a conscious regionalist. From 1936 to 1945 in her home in north Georgia’ she and her friend Paula Snelling co-edited the most liberal journal in the South. (The name of the magazine changed from Pseudopodia to North Georgia Review and finally to South Today.) During that time Smith traveled extensively in the South and began to speak about the profound evil of segregation as a way of life and how it injured the quality of Southern culture. After the publica-

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tion of her bestseller Strange Fruit (1944), she received thousands of invitations to speak all over the country. She continued to be a very popular speaker, especially on college campuses, even though after Killers of the Dream (1949) she and her books were rarely mentioned in the press.

The publication of this new collection of her essays and speeches should mark the beginning of a much needed reassessment of the significance of Lillian Smith’s life and her contribution to the study of human values in American culture. Paula Snelling’s Preface provides the biographical context within which Smith worked as a social critic and as an artist. Michelle Cliff’s arrangement of the essays thematically and chronologically illustrates the evolution of Smith’s ideas over some thirty years as a published writer. To those who do not know Lillian Smith the volume as a whole provides an excellent introduction to her life and work. For those who are already familiar with, any or all of her seven published books, The Winner Names the Age will provide a new perspective from which to appreciate her total impact as a writer and a spokesperson for our age.

In the title essay, which was the commencement address at Atlanta University, June 3, 1957, Lillian Smith said: “An age is named for its triumphs, for the big ideas that add stature to the human being …. We cannot name our age, the winner will do that. What we can do is pick the winner.” For Smith, the process of picking the winner meant giving support to the ideas which encourage human growth and freedom. Her conscious struggle with the forces of dehumanization in the South led her, in the best of regionalism, to create a larger vision and to encourage the ideas which in the distant future would cause our century to be named “the age of human relationships.

As a Southerner and a woman Lillian Smith struggled with limitations- and hostilities which everywhere seemed to separate individuals from each other and from knowledge of the world around them. Refusing to be defined by the circumstances of her time and place, she dared to break the silence which her culture for so long imposed on the subjects of race and sex. Lillian Smith viewed segregation in any form as symbolic and symptomatic of a fundamental split which had to be bridged if human beings were to realize themselves fully. In her words:

We as human beings are broken and fragmented and it is our nature to be so: upon being born we are torn from certainties, separated from so much we long to unite with …. But it is also at the essence of the human condition that we relate ourselves to what we are broken away from. We cannot merge, we cannot mingle, but we can relate. And it is by

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means of this relating, this bridging of chasms that we become new beings and learn to create a new life.

Seeking to convey this larger dimension of her views on race and sex, she said: “I have written of people split off from their future and sometimes from their own childhood. I have written of broken relationships, of torn integrities, of invisible walls against which we destroy ourselves.”

As school systems throughout the country continue to struggle in the courts and in the classrooms with the effects of a racially segregated society, Smith’s advice in 1944 remains useful:

Although segregation has made human relationships most difficult, nothing but human relationships can break down segregation …. The two processes of’ breaking down segregation and building up human relations must go on simultaneously. Neither has priority over the other.

Smith’s emphasis on human relationships as the key to effecting social change grew out of her earliest questions as a child in a small Southern town at the beginning of the twentieth century. She wanted to know why she was forbidden to show love for her Black nurse or to play with a friend whom adults said was a Negro. The whys of her childhood grew to encompass the far reaching questions of her adulthood: Why do we live ‘in a segregated society? Why do we have wars? What is the meaning of human life on this planet? Thus, in many of her speeches and essays, the subject of racial segregation became a point of departure for discussion of a wide range of other issues. Smith saw the failure of American society to do away with racism as a symptom of a grave illness suffered by the whole of Western culture: the loss of a sense of human relatedness. That loss of human purpose, in her view, also could be seen in modern society’s “over esteem of technology and our pathetic craving for proof.” Writing in 1960 during the height of. the bomb shelter scare, Smith asserted that nuclear war was not humanity’s number one enemy, but rather “the terminal symptom” of “the creeping, persisting, ever widening dehumanization of man.”

In a 1941 essay “Man Born of Woman,” Smith proposed that the search for an understanding of the causes of war in human society must consider the significance of the nature of male/female relationships, specifically the place of women in men’s eyes. She wrote:

If man dared to thrust into the open his unending secret enmity against women, there might be less of nation warring with nation; less need for him to merge his longing for superiority into a great mass-lust for power, less need for him to find outlet for his hate-drives which so complicate the more simple and rational needs of people.

Yet, to alter the effect on society of the ancient enmity between the sexes, Smith seemed to suggest that women would have to do most of the changing. In both “Man Born of Woman” and the 1963 speech “Woman Born of Man” she called upon women to resist the limitations of “man’s valuation” of themselves and to assert their own life affirming qualities to create a new society; but she concluded, “man’s dreams of himself will never change.”

The profound significance of women’s lack of self-definition was developed further in the speech “Autobiography as Dialogue between King and Corpse” in which Smith declared the writing of autobiographies to be essential to the modern age. She felt the models of individual lives could offset the forces of mass technology by reminding us of the significance of individuals and that “differences are to be cherished for they are important to the individual and the self.” Yet, she observed, women have not written great autobiographies because they have lacked awareness of themselves as persons and “they dare not tell the truth about themselves for it might radically change male psychology.”

Throughout her life Lillian Smith personally confronted the obstacles that stand in the way of women seeking to realize themselves. She also knew that those barriers affect both men and women. In the words of Paula Snelling’s Preface, “She knew the sharp two edgedness of swords that separate, she had seen that men no less than women, Whites no less than Blacks are deformed and stunted by arbitrary exclusions of the other from full human status.”

The presence of The Winner Names The Age should mark an end to the critical silence surrounding Lillian Smith. The effect of this new collection of her writing is the creation of a new awareness, not only of the life and work of the author, but more importantly, of the larger vision of her regional consciousness: a perspective which continues to challenge the values of American culture as a whole.

Rose Gladney is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa.

A Bluffer’s Guide to Recent Southern Fiction

By Mary Frances Derfner

Vol. 1, No. 10, 1979 pp. 14-18

In late 1975 and early 1976, several seemingly innocuous pieces of paper got me into grim trouble, which has continued unabated ever since. The first was a notice informing me that I had been elected to the Southern Regional Council, and would I like to serve? I dutifully checked yes, I’d love to. A month or so later, the second arrived: the Council’s 1975 Lillian Smith Awards would be presented at a banquet in several weeks, and would I like to come? The nonfiction award was going to two friends of mine who had co-edited a Mississippi History textbook. The fiction prize was going to someone (Reynolds Price) whose name was altogether unfamiliar. It would be nice to see my friends and get a feel for what the Council was like. I again checked yes, I’d love to, and showed up. This simple act led, several months later, to the third piece of paper: would I like to serve on the 1976 Lillian Smith Awards Committee?

At this point I panicked. A college dropout without a single literature course to my name, the most serious reading I had done for the past dozen years was a chapter or two of a paperback someone else had discarded on an airplane. I didn’t even know who Lillian Smith was, much less what she had written. Obviously, someone who had never heard of Reynolds Price didn’t belong on a jury the purpose of which was to judge Southern literature. But, unwilling to expose myself as a fraud (I had, after all, gone to the dinner), I once again compulsively checked yes, I’d love to, and hied myself immediately to the local paperback bookstore.

Now, I’ve always been a firm believer in “How To,” “Guide To,” and “Introduction To” books. They have helped me learn how, in no particular order, to play the guitar, type, fix my house, my car and my love life, raise my plants and my children, cook, and gain control of my life and time. They have enabled me to discuss Plato, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the like without having read them, and logical positivism, behaviorism, humanism and the like without having understood them. A little knowledge may indeed be dangerous – witness the fact that I was drafted for the Smith Awards Committee in the first place – but it somehow seems better than total ignorance. This time, however, Barnes & Noble let me down: not a single guide to Southern literature. The salesperson hadn’t even heard of Lillian Smith.

The stereotypical librarian, however, had, as I learned at my next stop. The public library had none of Lillian Smith’s works, and the librarian obviously thought me a pervert for having asked. The library did, however, have several books by such critics and theorists of Southern literature as Louis D. Rubin, Jr., C. Hugh Holman, and Walter Sullivan. I emerged from the library four or five hours later, hav-

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ing discovered that one can get an extremely superficial handle on Southern fiction prior to the mid 1940’s, but that the last three decades of Southern literature are incapable of broad-brush, Barnes & Noble treatment. There seems to be greater disagreement among the aforementioned experts about these three decades than about the three centuries which preceded them.

I learned in my four-hour, selftaught Southern Lit. course that the South produced very little good literature between the beginning of the Late Unpleasantness and the end of World War I. At this time something called the Southern Renascence (it’s gauche to spell it “Renaissance”) began, and the likes of William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and Robert Penn Warren started writing. The critics tell us that a separate society inundated by “outside influences,” as was the South in 1920 or so, begins to look inward with a comparative and/or critical eye. The most creative members of the society see it, finally, face to face, and capture it before the “outside influences” alter or destroy its unique fiber. In this view the Southern Renascence is somewhat akin to the last fling of a dying man, who, seeing the apocalypse, produces – and produces with genius – so that his children won’t forget.

The Renascence, Southern literature qua Southern literature, the dying man, and even his children’s memory, are, since the mid-1940’s or 1950’s, either dead, terminal, or merely changed, depending upon which theorist one consults. We have all heard arguments since the early 1970’s that the concept of the South as an entity separate from America is no longer valid that Dixie is now inexorably Americanized (that is, dead) or become part of the “Sunbelt” (definitely terminal). But there are diehards – the Southerners who claim that much, both good and bad, is still unique in this changed South, and who are unwilling to

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concede that the replacement of the Main Street Cafe by the Golden Arches indicates the death or dying of what’s uniquely good, or uniquely bad,, about the South. This controversy is mirrored by the critical disagreement over Southern fiction of the past 25 or 30 years: does Southern literature, as opposed to American literature, still exist, and, if so, almost secondarily, is it any good?

Back to the paperback bookstore. It was by now obvious to me that I would have to invest a great deal of time preparing myself for what was coming. I picked up a few Faulkner novels, All the King’s Men, some Thomas Wolfe, an arcane novel by Andrew Lytle, and early Welty, an early Caldwell. I would try to determine what was so good about the Renascence authors, so that I could later decide about the modern authors. Once home, I removed all potential distractions – the television, my country music albums, my children and the dog – from what was to become known as the Bozart Room (formerly the living room), and set to work. I wasted an hour leafing through “How to Read a Book,” which, after a promising start, turned out to be a guide to underlining and outlining, and then began perhaps the most enjoyable spring and summer of my life.

I moved quickly through early Renascence, and on to late Renascence, post-World WarII and modern authors. I read Ellen Glasgow, Allen Tate, Richard Wright, Katherine Anne Porter, Ralph Ellison, Reynolds Price, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, James Agee, Alice Walker, William Styron. I brought my classical background music collection out of hiding, and even started, by early summer, to read critically acclaimed non-Southern authors, so that I could see for myself whether, and, if so, why, Southern authors were different. I found, bought and read a cache of Lillian Smith’s mostly out-of-print books in a second-hand bookstore on Cape Cod. (Obviously some Southerner, expelled from his homeland because of his reading proclivities, had known I was coming.) By mid-July, when the first Lillian Smith Award entry arrived in the mail, I felt at least marginally prepared.

During my three seasons on the Lillian Smith Awards Committee, we considered more than 50 fiction and more than 100 nonfiction entries, published between mid-1975 and the end of 1978. The criteria for the Awards specify only that a book be about the Southern region, not necessarily of it, and so not all of the fiction was written by Southerners. On the basis of both those entries which were and my outside reading, however, I’ll Take My Stand: yes, there still is a distinctive Southern literature, though much changed to reflect and suit the times; and a good deal of that literature is very good.

First, there are several “holdovers” – authors who started to write during the Renascence, and who are still writing. While Robert Penn Warren’s A Place to Come To, published in 1977, cannot compare to All the King’s Men, it is still a very good novel, and a decidedly Southern one, focusing largely on time and the past’s encroachment on the present. Another agrarian, Andrew Lytle, is also still writing. While he has not produced a novel since The Velvet Horn in 1957, his Wake for the Living, published in 1976, indicates that his artistic abilities have not faded, and that his work is still uniquely Southern, dealing heavily with themes of family, community, tradition and religion. And Eudora Welty, whose collection of critical essays, The Eye of the Story, appeared in 1978, seems to have lost none of her genius. Losing Battles, published in 1970, surpasses both some of her earlier fiction and most American fiction of the past several decades, no matter what or where the source. The presence of these three alone is enough to answer “the Renascence is dead” crowd: some of the best are still here, and they have produced first-rate fiction since 1954, generally the last date given for the demise of the Renascence.

But the “the Renascence is dying” crowd would protest, with some justification, that holdovers don’t count; that these authors were raised on the same hand-picked, insecticide- and pollution-free, pre-civil rights corn and grits as Faulkner and Wolfe, and it is their presence alone which keeps the Renascence alive. The South, they might proclaim, has become splintered, industrialized and Americanized to the point where it is too barren to support good regional literature. The holdovers are still supported by their own historical memory, but what about those deracinated Southerners who started to write after World War II? To answer the recurrent charge that

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these younger authors have produced fiction which is both too universal in perspective to be called Southern and not as worthy as that of earlier Southern writers, one can call such names as William Styron, Walker Percy, John Barth, Harry Crews, Alice Walker, Peter Taylor, Reynolds Price, Barry Hannah and Ernest J. Gaines., among others. These authors represent some of the best literary talent in the country at the present time; and, Southerners all, they all write Southern literature – literature which draws not only its locations, characters, dialogue, and the mood from the South, but its perspectives, themes and tone as well.

The most rabid of the deathsayers would have to concede both the genius and Southernness of Flannery O’Connor, the Georgia novelist and short story writer whose first work, Wise Blood, was published in 1952, and whose final collection of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, was published posthumously in 1965. Her artistry, her concentration on family, her deft handling of abstraction through the concrete, her religious view of man, her sardonic comedy, her sense of irony, her tale-spinning abilities, are all as deeply Southern as are her characters and her settings. Unlike other Southerners of her generation, whose current protestations that they are not producing Southern literature serve to fuel the fires of the death-and-dying group, O’Connor never denied it. As late as 1963, she wrote that Southern fiction is still maintained by community; that the Southern writers succeed by finding within their communities what they need to sustain artistic vision.

But one person – even if she is Flannery O’Connor – does not a literature make or sustain. Other post-War authors who are, undeniably Southern and undeniably very good are: Reynolds Price, whose A Long and Happy Life and A Generous Man could not have been set anywhere outside the South, and whose Surface of Earth, winner of the 1975 Lillian Smith Award in fiction, is deeply concerned with time, place, order, history, and the richness of the past; Peter Taylor, whose masterful short stories are Southern in setting, theme and outlook; and Barry Hannah, whose Southern grotesques, irony, violence and comedy are reminiscent of O’Connor. Outstanding among post-War Black authors who are undeniably Southern are Ernest Gaines, whose In My Father’s House won this year’s Lillian Smith Award in fiction, and whose earlier novels, Catherine Carmier and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman won wide acclaim; and Alice Walker, whose Third Life of Grange Copeland and Meridian are both striking novels of Black struggle and survival in the modern South. Miss Walker is also an accomplished poet, and received the 1973 Lillian Smith fiction prize for Revolutionary Petunias, a volume of poetry.

Two of the best of the moderns, Walker Percy and William Styron, are not so obviously writers of Southern literature. The death-anddying crowd in fact point to these two to prove their point: both of these talented gentlemen even deny themselves that they are Southern writers; they both deal with fairly heavy, abstract and non-Southern existentialist themes: they are both superb writers, but, we are told, definitely not Southern writers except insofar as their locales are Southern.

While it is true that Styron early on denied that he was a Southern writer, he later backed down a little and said that his novels somehow seemed to revolve around traditionally Southern themes and concerns. Lie Down in Darkness, Styron’s first novel, published in 1951, is palpably Southern, if New South rather than Old. His second novel, Set This House on Fire, which appeared in 1960, is not. Most of the action, in fact, takes place abroad, and the tone is decidedly existentialist and non-Southern. The protagonist is a type of Southerner with which readers are unfamiliar one who muses at length in abstractions; one who leaves home and community. Can this be a Southern novel? The answer, of course, is yes:

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it is one form of the new, or altered, Renascence literature. Styron’s high style is typically Southern; there is tragedy in the hero’s alienation because to be Southern is to need community and individualism at the same time, and Cass is alienated from both society and himself. In the end, his return to himself (and, ultimately, to community and the South) is made on moral grounds, not on grounds of existential expediency. Cass becomes one of Southern literature’s first moral existentialists, a type of hero whom we will doubtless see much more often. Styron’s third novel is quintessentially Southern. The Confessions of Nat Turner, which was released in 1967, shares with Styron’s earlier works his Southern rhetoric. It exhibits a concern with religion and a theological view of mankind, an intricate and intense social structure, the paradox of man as both a member of society and an individual, morally responsible to himself and God alone, and the classical/Southern tragic theme.

Walker Percy shares much with Styron and Flannery O’Connor. Like O’Connor, he is a Catholic and deals extensively in his works with questions of religion. While his characters are not the grotesques of Flannery O’Connor, he, too, slaps and shocks the reader into paying attention by presenting the unusual in an overblown way. Like Styron, Percy denies being a Southern writer (“Would you ask John Cheever,” he wrote in Esquire, “if he regarded himself as a northeastern writer?”), but later betrays his Southernness (the “best thing that could happen has something to do with Southern good nature, good manners, kidding around, with music, with irony…”). Percy, too, is an existentialist, but a decidedly Christian one, who advocates the leap of faith as an alternative to nothingness. And Percy is, indeed, a Southern writer. His novels all concern religious/moral questions and absolutes; his works all contain marvelous humor and irony, in the best of Southern tradition; he is wary of abstraction and communicates through the concrete. As a counterpoint to the despair of some of his characters and the resignation of others, he poses the traditional Southern concept of stoicism: Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, his protagonist in Lancelot(1977), and Aunty Emily, a minor character in The Moviegoer(1961), are Southern stoics par excellence. Also evident in Percy’s works are the past (why, wonders The Last Gentlemen, can he not face life as resolutely as did his ancestors?); the influence of family, the importance of place, community and order (the most lost of his heroes, The Last Gentleman, appears first in New York’s Central Park, and then as a resident of a very mobile R.V.). Percy is, in short, another new Renascence Man.

I thus finally convinced myself that the Renascence still lives. I must admit that I was predisposed to take this position before I set about the task of reading. I have never been accused of having an open mind, but, in all fairness to those who take the opposite view, I devised a test. There are those who argue, very convincingly at times, that the two authors that I had to pinch and squeeze and then stretch a bit to fit into a Southern mold. Styron and Percy, are authors who simply use the South as a convenient locale to portray the universal decadence and downfall of America today. I asked myself whether the novels of Styron and Percy would work if transposed, say, to Philadelphia, or Madison, Wisconsin. While I could never conceive of Faulkner’s novels occurring anywhere other than in Mississippi, Styron and Percy would work in Philadelphia. The point is, though, that they would not be as effective or as real or as good in Philadelphia. The themes would seem less powerful, less evocative, and very definitely out of place in Madison. Somehow, while Percy’s Lancelot could very easily be incarcerated in San Francisco, staring at Divisidero Street, we’re a lot more comfortable with him, and he says a lot more to us, staring at Annunciation Street in Old New Orleans.

Perhaps, then, the New Southern literature of Renascence II, differs distinctly from that of Renascence I. New concerns have crept in, and new forms are being tried. But the New Southern author approaches those forms, and deals with those concerns, in a Southern fashion, gives them a home grown twist, shakes them all up and comes up with a Southern answer or impasse. The scroll given to the winner of the Lillian Smith Award describes Smith as “so deeply rooted at home that her heart embraced the world.” Perhaps that is true of recent Southern fiction as well. James McBride Dabbs seems to think so. He writes, in Civil Rights in Recent Southern Fiction (1969), that “a Southern writer can be so deeply human that the basic themes of the South are almost unrecognizable in his stories. Yet they will be there.” And they are.

Mary Frances Derfner is currently vice president of the Southern Regional Council and chairperson of next year’s Lillian Smith Award committee.

Southern Newspapers: Watching the Watchdogs

By Larry Noble

Vol. 1, No. 10, 1979 pp. 19-23

Daily newspapers play a key role in the lives of the people of the South. The papers provide us with commercial and economic information, with information on political and non-political events, with entertainment information and entertainment itself. They also present us with advice on what positions we should take on public affairs and furnish a controlled forum of letters to the editor.

Newspapers are also very lucrative businesses. About two thirds of the space in the daily newspapers is devoted to advertising. Traditionally, the personnel costs of newspapers has been kept low, while revenues are high – a combination of which produces large profit margins. Adding to these substantial margins is the trend over the recent decades to be fewer newspapers, hence less competition, especially in the large cities.

Newspapers, as watchdogs of our liberties, are especially protected by the Constitution. The First Amendment declares that Congress shall make no law “abridging” the freedom of the press. States also provide constitutional press protection, and in 1931 the U.S. Supreme Court went a step further and said that the national government will insure press freedom from state and local government encroachment. Despite occasional attacks on the press which have been sanctioned by the various branches of the nationalgovernment (such as the Supreme Court under the leadership Warren Burger is presently conducting) the constitutional protections remain.

The role of the press is extremely important as we seek to build a more just and equitable society. The press is proud of its assigned role, and says so, especially during National Newspaper Week once a year. But who watches the watchdogs? Is the press doing its job properly and effectively? What is the actual content of these newspapers day in and day out, year by year? What information and opinions are they giving to us?

Southern Newspaper Content

In an effort to answer these questions for daily newspapers in the South, a study was made of the decade of the 1960s. One morning daily newspaper in an important economic and political center was chosen from each of the eleven Southern states.

These newspapers were: Richmond Times Dispatch; Charlotte Observer;

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The State, Columbus, S.C.; Atlanta Constitution; Tampa Tribune; Birmingham Post-Herald; The Tennessean, Nashville; Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, Ms.; Times-Picayune, New Orleans; Dallas Morning News; and Arkansas Gazette, Little Rock.

The content of the newspapers was read, measured, coded and analyzed. A random sample was taken of the decade, twelve dates for each of the ten years. Sunday issues of the newspapers were not included. Some twelve million column inches of newspapers content were included in the study covering a total of 1,320 issues of newspapers.

For purposes of the study the content was divided into news, opinion, and advertising. Opinion was further divided into editorials, editorial cartoons, editorial opinion columns, and letters to the editor. The material was studied by geographical coverage, government level and branch, and public policy issue. Over two hundred categories were examined. A few of the findings of the study are reported in the present article. The Southern Regional Council is planning to publish the entire study later this year.

Study Findings

Only about ten percent of the total newspapers – thirty percent excluding advertising – was devoted to news about politics and government. At every level, local, state, and national, news attention was focused more on the administrative agencies than on the executive, legislative, or judicial branches. It was policy administration and not policy-making that lent itself to the heaviest coverage. Part of this stems from the character of the policy-making machinery of government. Although the people are getting more information on policy after it has been made than during the policy-making process, at least they are hearing about the end that touches them most directly. With more press attention to the production of the policy, the people would have a greater voice in the

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making of policies which affect them.

Only four political subjects received more than ten percent coverage each. These were military affairs, war and peace, education, and political parties and elections.

About half of the news dealt with events at the local level, and half of that was political or economic in nature. Slightly over one-fourth of the news covered national events. State news made up eleven percent of the news. Regional news – news about the South – got only three percent of the coverage.

International events made up ten percent of all news. Within this category, Europe received the most attention, with forty percent of the coverage. Asia, including Vietnam War reportage. received thirty-two percent. These were followed by Latin America. with thirteen percent, Africa, with eleven percent, United Nations, with six percent, and Canada, with two percent.

The newspapers examined in the study were essentially White newspapers, so the coverage of Black community affairs was almost nonexistent. Most of the newspapers cleaned up their most blatant racist practices during the 1960s. That is, classified advertising by race, designating race to Blacks only in crime stories, and segregated Black social news was abandoned except in the most racist newspapers.

The study attempted to place the newspapers on a liberalconservative continuum. Editorials and cartoons, the most local reflection of views of the newspaper, excluding letters to the editor, were examined for attitudes on six selected issues. These issues were: race, big government, business, freedom of expression, the Vietnam War, and poverty and welfare policies. It was assumed that the attitudes which were the most anti-Black, anti-big government, probusiness, antifreedom of expression, pro-Vietnam War, and anti-poverty and welfare policies would be the most conservative, and that the opposite attitudes would be most liberal. The

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attitudes were examined and rated with a percentage score. Percentage scores were then added for a total score. The scores were derived so that the highest scores would reflect the most liberal views, and lowest scores most conservative. Attitudes in editorials were scored separately, as were attitudes in cartoons, and the scores were combined. The combined rating is presented below, with scores by issue.

A perfect total liberal score would be 600, and a perfect total conservative score would be 0. The score range for each individual issue would be, from most liberal to most conservative, 100 to 0. On several of the issues, if not all, the dichotomy is ambiguous. Early in the decade, for instance, liberals were very much in favor of the Vietnam War. Liberals and conservatives both support business interests. And conservative whites are discovering that there are also conservative Blacks, who can be new allies.

Based on this scoring scheme, the newspapers fall into three groups. Little Rock, Charlotte, Atlanta and Nashville can be called most liberal. New Orleans, Tampa, and Birmingham are in the middle. Richmond, Dallas. Columbia, and Jackson are most conservative.

Letters to the editor were scored using the same methods as were used for editorials and cartoons: The results ran from most liberal to most conservative as follows, with total scores in parentheses: Little Rock (365), Atlanta (322), Charlotte (314), New Orleans (291), Nashville (290), Tampa (267), Columbia (232), Richmond (221), Dallas (185), Birmingham (184), and Jackson (152).

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The letter groupings were similar to those for editorials and cartoons. The range from liberal to conservative was smaller among letter writers, and letter writers seemed less liberal than liberal editors and less conservative than conservative editors. Birmingham writers probably reflected the editorial position of the local editor more than the editorials and cartoons. That newspaper is part of the ScrippsHoward chain, and many of the editorials were not written locally.

The editorial material was further examined to see if it urged citizens to vote or to take other action, if policy changes were urged at various governmental levels, if policy was ever critized, or if policy was praised. The theory was that newspapers which were effective watchdogs would be critical, would urge specific changes, would encourage citizens to seek action, and would praise where justified.

The study showed that only a tiny percentage of the editorial material urged citizens to vote or to act. The conservative papers urged the most policy changes at the national level and the least at the local level. Local -government received very little criticism from any newspaper, but a great deal of criticism was aimed at the international level. There was generally more criticism than urging or praise. Positions of praise accounted for about one-third of total positions, and there was a high level of praise for national government, though praise for local and state governments combined exceeded the national amount of praise.

About half of the letters to the editor were critical. The national government received the most criticism, followed by local, state, international, and regional. Letter writers in the conservative newspapers were heavily critical of the national government, writers in liberal papers were less so. Editors of papers published in state capitals used letters to produce the most criticism of state government.

Most political opinion columns were of the nationally syndicated type, devoted almost exclusively to national and international issues. Columns contained slightly more praise than criticism, and had few suggestions for policy changes.

Some one-fourth of the editorials suggested specific policy changes. About one-half of these suggestions were for the national level, and onethird for the state entities. Only onefifth of the letter-writers made policy suggestions, and these were mostly at the state and local levels.

The biggest advertisers in the newspapers were the department stores of all types, food stores, and businesses that sell, maintain, and in any other way deal with automobiles. Classified ads made up about thirty percent of all advertising in space used. The largest newspapers by number of pages might be expected to have the most advertising and the most text. In fact, the largest papers had such a large volume of advertising that the text in those papers did not amount to much more than the amount of text in the smaller papers. When the newspaper grows in size, it makes more and more money through advertising, but it does not give a commensurate amount of news and other features.

Conclusions

This very brief sampling of a voluminous study gives us only a clue about what our daily newspapers were presenting to us during the 1960s. Most of them were conservative on selected issues, and most letter-writers were also conservative. On the other hand, very conservative editors were more conservative than the writers of the letters which they published, and very liberal editors were more liberal than the writers of their published letters. The newspapers were not urging us to act, and although they did provide a commentary on governmental issues, they did not suggest specific policies for change.

The newspapers were apparently making a lot of money. Ninety percent of the newspaper was devoted to something other than the watchdog function of attending to political and governmental matters. About two-thirds of the newspaper was advertising. Newspaper revenue comes from two main sources, circulation and advertising – three parts advertising and one part circulation. To get a rough estimate of the income of a newspaper, figure the circulation revenue from the circulation figures and subscription rates and prices (it ill be a rough figure) and multiply by four.

Local and national affairs were covered well on the basis of allocation of text space. State, international, and regional affairs got much less attention. Yet editorially, attention went outside the local community, especially critical editorial concern.

Very little attention was paid to the affairs of the Black community by these white newspapers. That might have been expected. African affairs, in the decade of liberation on that continent, received the smallest amount of international coverage. There was six times more news about Europe.

These newspapers are locally rooted economic institutions with strong interests in protecting their powerful positions. During the 1960s, they directed critical attention away from the actions of state and local governments, and focused instead on the national government. A pattern of newspaper behavior emerged revealing little coverage or criticism of local and state policymakers. In addition, these newspapers were covering only one segment of the community the white segment. These and other practices raise serious questions about the performance of these Southern daily newspapers during the 1960s.

Attitudes shown by editorials and cartoons in selected Southern daily newspapers during the 1960’s
Liberal to Conservative, high to low, attitudes in editorials and cartoons, by percentage of agreement.

(For instance, Columbia, was 98 percent opposed to positions favorable to Black people; 96 percent opposed to big government; 91 percent favorable to business; 70 percent opposed to freedom of expression; 89 percent in favor of the Vietnam War; and 77 percent opposed to pro poverty and welfare policies.)

Larry Noble teaches political science at Atlanta University.

Paper	Race	Big	Bus.	FExp.	VietW	PosW	Total
Little Rock	90	75	58	89	76	88	476
Charlotte	77	41	59	87	71	87	422
Atlanta	73	66	35	83	32	94	383
Nashville	43	74	55	77	41	81	371
New Orleans	33	48	28	40	27	75	251
Tampa	37	37	40	61	37	30	242
Birmingham	35	25	36	44	33	69	242
Richmond	18	19	30	29	28	14	138
Dallas	26	14	6	34	4	10	94
Columbia	2	4	9	30	11	23	79
Jackson	10	32	4	9	5	6	66

Book Review: THE CAJUNS Essays on Their History and Culture

By C. Paige Gutierrez

Vol. 1, No. 10, 1979 pp. 24-25

Glenn K. Conrad, ed. The Cajuns: Essays on Their History and Culture. Published by the Center for Louisiana Studies University of South-western Louoisiana, Lafayette, 1978. Illustrated.

The Southern psyche has long been analyzed, romanticized, and mythologized by scholars, journalists, novelists and others who have taken up the task of explicating that most peculiar region of the United States. However, in their attempts to make sense of the area below the Mason-Dixon line, too few of these observed have seemed to notice that they have subsumed in their -generalizations a sub-region lying south of the Piney Woods, south of the South. The distinctiveness of the central Gulf Coast has often been overlooked by both the national and the Southern media, partly because of the fact that the area is, for better or worse, parceled out among several states whose boundaries extend considerably northward into “alien” territory. The analyst who concentrates on that which is encompassed by political boundaries is likely to miss the greater significance of that which is encompassed by historical /cultural boundaries.

Coastal Louisiana has not been as complacent about this situation as have been coastal Mississippi and Alabama. For over a decade southern Louisiana has been declaring its cultural uniqueness through various aspects of what is loosely called the French Renaissance Movement. Since 1968, when the Louisiana legislature gave the name “Acadiana” to twenty-two southern parishes, this movement has manifested itself through language education programs, historical preservation projects, renewal of cultural ties with Gallic countries, advertising campaigns, and a generalized renewal of interest and pride in the regional heritage. Although the French Renaissance Movement has its share of internal conflict and inconsistancies – not the least of which revolve around the self-understanding of Louisiana’s French (as well as nonFrench) heritage – the resurgence of French pride, and especially of Cajun French pride, is a start.

The media through which the new Cajun consciousness is expressed range from bumper stickers and Tshirts to record albums, plays, festivals, television shows, periodicals, and scholarly books. Of the latter,Glenn Conrad’s The Cajuns: Essays on Their History and Culture is perhaps the most ambitious. Conrad and eleven other writers, all of whom are well versed in Louisiana studies, have produced a collection of scholarly yet readable articles on a wide range of topics related to Cajun or Acadian history, language, environment, architecture, folk song, education, folklore, and politics. – Some of the essays are rather narrow in scope, such as Gabriel Debien’s account of the Acadian exiles’ stay in Santo Domingo, or Elizabeth Brandon’s analysis of the folk song “La Delaissee.” Such essays are aimed at the experienced student of Cajun history and culture and presuppose a general knowledge of the problem under study.

Other essays in the book are of interest to a more general audience. Conrad’s article, “The Acadians: Myths and Realities,” provides an historical analysis of the portrayal of the Cajun in both the scholarly and popular media. He maintains that the Cajun image has been dichotomized in terms of two extremes: Cajun life has been seen as either that of the ignorant, superstitious swamp dweller, or as that of the pristine peasant of Longfellow’s Evangeline. Neither image is accurate. The entire book, in fact, is an attempt at bringing balance to the understanding of the Cajun experience, although the reader may suspect at times that certain of the

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writers have been so steeped in Evangeline that they can’t quite let go of the myth themselves.

Patricia Rickels makes one of the most useful contributions to the understanding of the modern Cajun in her essay entitled “The Folklore of Acadians.” Rickels distinguishes between the “Genteel Acadians” and the “Just Plain Coonasses.” The Genteel Acadians, or the Acadian Establishment, are the more formally educated and/or wealthier of the Cajuns. Their use of the term Acadian rather than Cajun reflects a propriety which Rickels claims is “diametrically opposed” to the philosophy of the Coonass. The term “coonass,” once used by outsiders as an ethnic slur, is now used by those Cajuns who have no qualms about their involvement in traditional activities such as beer drinking, cock-fighting, gambling, and other “earthy” pastimes. The Genteel Acadian is likely to speak a nonstandard Cajun dialect. These differences between the two groups have understandably been responsible for much of the conflict centering around the direction being taken by the French Renaissance Movement. It should be added that the Genteel Acadian and the Just Plain Coonass are, of course, ideal types best thought of as representing poles on a continuum, with most Cajuns fitting somewhere in between these Moreover, Vaughan Baker, in her essay “The Acadians in Antebellum Louisiana: A Study of Acculturation,” has traced the existence of the elite and the non-elite lifestyles in southern Louisiana through antebellum times. Although Rickels suggests that the non-elite Cajun is more likely to be a repository of folk culture, it would be unwise to conclude that either group is more or less “Cajun” than the other. Both have been on the scene for two centuries.

Also of special interest to the general reader is Mathe Allain’s “Twentieth Century Acadians.” Allain wisely begins by pointing out the dearth of research materials available on the topic and proceeds to write a perceptive, journalistic piece based largely on her own observations. Allain has an eye for the subtleties of everyday life; she notes the changes that have taken place in flower gardens over the years and the continuing small town practice of listing nicknames in the phone directories. And she is quick to recognize the influence of American popular culture on Cajun life, whether it be via the automobile or “I Love Lucy.” Such observations are rarely the hallmark of the historian or folklorist searching for signs of a “true” folk culture. However, Allain and several other essayists have notably realistic perspectives on the complexities of the relationships between folk culture, popular culture, high culture, and “fakelore” in Acadiana.

A major weakness of The Cajuns is its lack of either an introductory or concluding essay. Such an essay would serve to tie together certain themes running through the book and point out problems of definition that appear repeatedly. The question of “What is a Cajun?” might be partially answered through a synthesis of the definitions that are either implicit or explicit in each of the articles. A summarizing essay might note what may not be obvious to a non-native: the Cajuns described throughout much of the book are the Cajuns of western Acadiana. Although intra-regional variation is discussed in Malcolm Comeaux’ essay “Louisiana’s Acadians: The Environmental Impact,” it is neglected in many of the articles in The Cajuns.

Conrad’s book provides a broad coverage of subjects pertinent to Cajun studies; however, certain topics are conspicuous by their absence. For example, an analysis of the role of the Catholic Church in southern Louisiana is inexplicably missing. This omission is especially glaring in light of the fact that Catholicism provides perhaps the only factor that is a constant for almost all Cajuns, regardless of geographical subregion, economic level, or historical period. Also missing is attention to race relations in Acadiana. There were Blacks in southern Louisiana before there were Cajuns, and each group has influenced the other in varied and complex ways. The Cajuns would be further strengthened by the inclusion of an article on the oil industry and its economic, environmental, political, and social implications for southern Louisiana. Today roustabouting is as much a Cajun occupation as is crawfishing. Cajuns are proud of their worldwide reputation as the best offshore workers in the business, and Cajun communities now exist in North Sea ports of England and Scotland.

Despite these shortcomings, The Cajun is a valuable contribution to the study of Louisiana, the South, and the United States. An understanding of diverse subcultures and regional variation is a prerequisite to the understanding of the South and the nation as a whole. Regionally produced books like The Cajuns accelerate this understanding.

Paige Gutierrez, a graduate student in cultural anthropology at the University of North Carolina, is presently doing field research in Breaux Bridge. Louisiana.