44.On the special committee that put together the Farm Tenancy report, Henry Wallace was the chairman, and Will W. Alexander, R. G. Tugwell, M. L. Wilson, and Howard Odum were members, while Arthur Raper’s work was cited; see Farm Tenancy: Report of the President’s Committee, 28, 87.
45.See Harvey A. Kantor, “Howard W. Odum: The Implications of Folk, Planning, and Regionalism,” American Journal of Sociology 79, no. 2 (September 1973): 278–95, esp. 279–80; and Dewey W. Grantham Jr., “The Regional Imagination: Social Scientists and the American South,” Journal of Southern History 34, no. 1 (February 1968): 3–32, esp. 14–17.
46.Kantor, “Howard W. Odum,” 283. For Johnson’s reliance on Odum’s work, see Gerald W. Johnson, The Wasted Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937), esp. 6–7. On Johnson’s education and role as editor of the Baltimore Evening Sun, see review of “The Wasted Land,” Social Forces 17, no. 2 (December 1938): 276–79; also see Louis Mazzari, “Arthur Raper and Documentary Realism in Greene County, Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 87, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2003): 389–407, esp. 396–97; Stuart Kidd, Farm Security Administration Photography, the Rural South, and the Dynamics of Image-Making, 1935–1943 (Lewiston, NY: Edward Mellon Press, 2004), 50, 152–53; and Mary Summer, “The New Deal Farm Programs: Looking for Reconstruction in American Agriculture,” Agricultural History 74, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 241–57, esp. 248–50.
47.Johnson, The Wasted Land, 6–11, 21, 24–30; Howard Odum, Southern Pioneers in Social Interpretation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1925), 25; Howard Odum, “Regionalism vs. Sectionalism in the South’s Place in the National Economy,” Social Forces 12, no. 3 (March 1934): 338–54, esp. 340–41; Broadus Mitchell, “Southern Quackery,” Southern Economic Journal 3, no. 2 (October 1936): 143–47, esp. 146.
48.See Odum, “Regionalism vs. Sectionalism in the South’s Place in the National Economy,” esp. 339, 345; Mitchell, “Southern Quackery,” 145; and William B. Thomas, “Howard W. Odum’s Social Theories in Transition, 1910–1930,” American Sociologist 16, no. 1 (February 1981): 25–34, esp. 29–30; also see Odum’s assessment of southern regionalism in “The Regional Quality and Balance of America,” Social Forces 23, no. 3, In Search of the Regional Balance in America (March 1945): 269–85, esp. 276–77, 279–80.
49.See Howard K. Menhinick and Lawrence L. Durisch, “Tennessee Valley Authority: Planning in Operation,” Town Planning Review 24, no. 2 (July 1953): 116–45, esp. 128–30, 142; and F. W. Reeves, “The Social Development Program of the Tennessee Valley Authority,” Social Science Review 8, no. 3 (September 1934): 445–57, esp. 447, 449–53. For the importance of sociology in the planning process, see Arthur E. Morgan, “Sociology and the TVA,” American Sociological Review 2, no. 2 (April 1937): 157–65; William E. Cole, “The Impact of the TVA upon the Southeast,” Social Forces 28, no. 4 (May 1950): 435–40; Daniel Schaffer, “Environment and TVA: Toward a Regional Plan for the Tennessee Valley, 1930s,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 43, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 333–54, esp. 342–43, 349–50, 353; and Sarah T. Phillips, This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 80, 89, 96–98, 100, 105–7.
50.On the class and caste system (here he meant family and kinship in which inclusion was measured by intermarriage; this notion of caste was separate from the race–sex caste system), see Howard W. Odum, “The Way of the South,” Social Forces 23, no. 3, 258–68, esp. 266–67. Odum also believed that regions had a “folk personality” or “biography,” quoting Carl Sandburg to express the powerful hold of folk culture: “the feel and the atmosphere, the layout and the lingo of a region, of breeds of men, of customs and slogans, in a manner and air not given in regular history”; see Odum, ibid., 264, 268; also see Arthur T. Raper and Ira de A. Reid, “The South Adjusts—Downward,” Phylon 1, no. 1 (1st quarter, 1940): 6–27, esp. 24–26.
51.In this collection of letters, nine of the forty-six used the word “shiftless”; others used related terms. Benjamin Burke Kendrick and Thomas Abernathy thought “shiftless” would be a better term than “poor white.” See B. B. Kendrick to Howard Odum, March 10, 1938, and Thomas Abernathy to Odum, April 6, 1938. For “fuzzy,” see Charles Sydnor to Odum, March 12, 1939; for others on “shiftless,” also see Frank Owsley to Odum, March 27, 1938, Haywood Tearce to Odum, March 19, 1938, A. B. Moore to Odum, April 29, 1938, Earle Eubank to Odum, March 23, 1938, Read Bain to Odum, January 21, 1938, D. B. Taylor to Odum, January 25, 1938; and on “indolent, shiftless class,” see Dudley Tanner to Odum, January 25, 1938. See Howard Washington Odum Papers, 1908–82, Folder 3635, Special Collections, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
52.The word “shiftless” goes back to the 1500s meaning helpless, without resources, lazy, without a shift or shirt; see Oxford English Dictionary. On the shiftless behavior of Virginia planters and Louisiana slaves, see Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States (New York, 1861), 106, 373. For “shiftless” as a New England term, see “Shiftless,” Ohio Farmer, December 17, 1896; also see “‘Farmer Thrifty’ and ‘Farmer Shiftless,’” Maine Farmer, June 4, 1870. On the typical shiftless tavernkeeper, see Gail Dickersin Spilsbury, “A Washington Sketchbook: Historic Drawings of Washington,” Washington History 22 (2010): 69–87, esp. 73. On shiftless deserting husbands, and a bill passed in New York in 1897 called the “Shiftless Fathers Bill,” see Michael Willrich, “Home Slackers: Men, the State, and Welfare in Modern America,” Journal of American History 87, no. 2 (September 2000): 460–89, esp. 469. On eugenics and “shiftless,” see Irene Case and Kate Lewis, “Environment as a Factor in Feeble-Mindedness: The Noll Family,” American Journal of Sociology 23, no. 5 (March 1918): 661–69, esp. 662; Leonard, “Retrospectives: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era,” 220; Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, 48–49; and Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, 81–82. On the shiftlessness of poor whites in fiction, and the association of shiftlessness with tenancy and transiency, see William J. Flynt, Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989), ix, 63, 90, 160, 293. On shiftless vagabonds, see “Causes of Poverty,” Genesee Farmer and Gardner’s Journal, March 10, 1832; Todd Depastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 15, 102; and W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941), 22–24.
53.See movie review, which describes Stepin Fetchit as the “sluggard of the tale, the ebony creature whose distaste for work” is emphasized; “Hearts in Dixie” (1929), New York Times, February 28, 1929; and D. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum, 1994), 8; also see Ira de A. Reid to Howard Odum, February 2, 1938, Howard Washington Odum Papers.
54.See M. Swearingen to Howard Odum, June 13, 1938. On “social scum living like Negroes,” see Frederic L Paxon to Odum, March 18, 1938. On no clear line of demarcation between black and poor white homes, see Ulin W. Leavell to Odum, January 27, 1938. On poor whites being above Negroes “in only one respect, the matter of color,” see L. Guy Brown to Odum, February 6, 1938. On “looked down upon by all Negroes,” see A. C. Lervis to Odum, February 2, 1938. On working like blacks and living side by side with blacks, see W. A. Schiffley to Odum, February 7, 1938. On “briar hoppers,” see Earle Eubank to Odum, March 23, 1938, Howard Washington Odum Papers.
55.Raymond F. Bellamy to Howard Odum, January 21, 1938, Howard Washington Odum Papers.
56.B. O. Williams to Howard Odum, February 9, 1938, Howard Washington Odum Papers.
57.James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941; reprint ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 5–6, 8–9.
58.Ibid., 70–73, 127, 137, 164–65, 183–84, 205–6, 231–39. On the ninety-three pages of deta
iled description of the material culture, see Michael Trinkley, “‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’—If Only We Can Find Them,” Southeastern Archeology 2, no. 1 (Summer 1983): 30–36. On Agee’s distrust of the writer’s investment in the documentary process, see James S. Miller, “Inventing ‘Found’ Objects: Artifactuality, Folk History, and the Rise of Capitalist Ethnography in 1930s America,” Journal of American Folklore 117, no. 466 (Autumn 2004): 373–93, esp. 387–88.
59.Agee and Walker, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 184–85. As one reviewer at the time observed, Agee reveals as much about himself (and the things about ourselves that he represents) as about his subject, which was its “chief social documentary value”; see Ruth Lechlitner, “Alabama Tenant Families,” review of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, New York Herald Tribune Books, Sunday, August 24, 1941, 10; and for a discussion of this point, see Paula Rabinowitz, “Voyeurism and Class Consciousness: James Agee and Walker Evans, ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,’” Cultural Critique 21 (Spring 1992): 143–70, esp. 162.
60.Only around three hundred copies of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men were sold in 1941; see Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, 264; also see Donald Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan: Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938), 308; Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 594; and Edward S. Shapiro, “Donald Davidson and the Tennessee Valley Authority: The Response of a Southern Conservative,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 33, no. 4 (Winter 1974): 436–51, esp. 443.
61.Jennifer Ritterhouse, “Dixie Destinations: Rereading Jonathan Daniels’ A Southerner Discovers the South,” Southern Spaces (May 20, 2010).
62.Jonathan Daniels, A Southerner Discovers the South (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 31, 140, 148, 299–305. For the gully becoming a tourist site, see Paul S. Sutter, “What Gullies Mean: Georgia’s ‘Little Grand Canyon’ and Southern Environmental History,” Journal of Southern History 76, no. 3 (August 2010): 579–616, esp. 579, 582–83, 585–86, 589–90.
63.Daniels, A Southerner Discovers the South, 25, 58.
64.Ibid., 345.
65.Ibid., 346.
Chapter Ten: The Cult of the Country Boy: Elvis Presley, Andy Griffith, and LBJ’s Great Society
1.Randall Woods, LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (New York: Free Press, 2006), 458; Bobbie Ann Mason, Elvis Presley: A Life (New York: Viking, 2002), 105; Karal Ann Marling, “Elvis Presley’s Graceland, or the Aesthetic of Rock ’n’ Roll Heaven,” American Art 7, no. 4 (Autumn 1933), 99; Michael T. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 224.
2.Jack Gould, “TV: New Phenomenon: Elvis Presley Rises to Fame as Vocalist Who Is Virtuoso of Hootchy-Kootchy,” New York Times, June 6, 1956. For the zoot suit reference, see Jules Archer, “Stop Hounding Teenagers!: Elvis Presley Defends His Fans and His Music,” True Story (December 1956): 18–20, 22–24, 26, 28. “Elvis Presley: What? Why?,” Look Magazine (August 7, 1956): 82–85; Candida Taylor, “Zoot Suit: Breaking the Cold War’s Dress Code,” in Containing America: Cultural Production and Consumption in 50s America, eds. Nathan Abrams and Julie Hughes (Edgbaston, Birmingham, UK: University of Birmingham Press, 2000), 64–65; Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 169–70; and Michael Bertrand, “I Don’t Think Hank Done It That Way: Elvis, Country Music, and the Reconstruction of Southern Masculinity,” in A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music, eds. Kristine M. McCusker and Diane Pecknold (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 59–85, esp. 59, 62, 66, 73, 75, 84.
3.On the difficulties of overcoming his southern identity, see Joe B. Frantz, “Opening a Curtain: The Metamorphosis of Lyndon B. Johnson,” Journal of Southern History 45, no. 1 (February 1979): 3–26, esp. 5–7, 25.
4.On his inaugural address, see “The President’s Inaugural Address, January 20, 1965,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, 1965 (in Two Books), Book I—January 1 to May 31, 1965 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966), 71–74, esp. 73; Carroll Kilpatrick, “Great Society, World Without Hate,” Washington Post, January 21, 1965.
5.Dale Baum and James L. Hailey, “Lyndon Johnson’s Victory in the 1948 Texas Senate Race: A Reappraisal,” Political Science Quarterly 109, no. 4 (Autumn 1994): 595–13, esp. 596, 613; Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent (New York: Knopf, 1990), xxxii, 211, 218, 223, 228, 232, 238, 259–64, 268, 300; on Johnson’s crucial role in promoting NASA and shaping Kennedy’s space policy, see Andreas Reichstein, “Space—The Last Cold War Frontier?” Amerikastudien/American Studies 44, no. 1 (1999): 113–36.
6.For the theme of brotherhood over divisiveness, see “Address to the Nation upon Proclaiming a Day of Mourning Following the Death of Dr. King, April 5, 1968,” and his proclamation, in Public Papers of the Presidents, Book I—January 1 to June 30, 1968–1969, 493–95.
7.John O’Leary and Rick Worland, “Against the Organization Man: The Andy Griffith Show and the Small-Town Family Ideal,” in The Sitcom Reader, eds. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 73–84, esp. 80–82; also see syndicated columnist for the National Enterprise Association Erskine Johnson, “Andy Griffith Drops Yokel Role for Semi-intellectual,” Ocala Star-Banner, October 2, 1960.
8.On Gomer Pyle, see “Comedies: Success Is a Warm Puppy,” Time (November 10, 1967): 88; Anthony Harkins, “The Hillbilly in the Living Room: Television Representations of Southern Mountaineers in Situation Comedies, 1952–1971,” Appalachian Journal 29, no. 1/2 (Fall–Winter 2002): 98–126, esp. 106. The New York Times writer described Jim Nabors’s character as a “hillbilly,” with an “attractive awkwardness and naiveté,” who “merely assumes that everyone in the Marines is as friendly as the folks back home.” See Jack Gould, “TV: Freshness in Old Military Tale,” New York Times, September 26, 1964.
9.See the cover of Saturday Evening Post (February 2, 1963); “Hope Quips Convulse Convention,” Billboard: The International Music-Record Newsweekly (April 13, 1963), 41; Hal Humphrey, “Last Laugh on Ratings,” Milwaukee Journal, November 16, 1963; also see Harkins, “The Hillbilly in the Living Room,” 112, 114; Jan Whitt, “Grits and Yokels Aplenty: Depictions of Southerners on Prime-Time Television,” Studies in Popular Culture 19, no. 2 (October 1996): 141–52, esp. 148.
10.Richard Warren Lewis, “The Golden Hillbillies,” Saturday Evening Post (February 2, 1963): 30–35, esp. 34. Paul Henning produced, directed, and cowrote every episode of The Beverly Hillbillies; see Henning’s interview in Noel Hoston, “Folk Appeal Was Hooterville Lure,” [New London, CT] Day, August 10, 1986. The most influential Hollywood gossip columnist came to the defense of The Beverly Hillbillies, along with conservative women’s groups; see Hedda Hopper, “Hollywood: Hillbillies Take Off,” [New Orleans] Times-Picayune, March 23, 1964. Irene Ryan, who played Granny, offered this defense of the show: “When I was a kid I worked through the Ozarks, where our characters are supposed to be from. They are terribly funny, warm people, but up to now nobody ever really got ’em down on paper. Our show did”; see Muriel Davidson, “Fame Arrived in a Gray Wig, Glasses and Army Boots,” TV Guide (September 7, 1963): 5–7, esp. 5.
11.On the connection between The Beverly Hillbillies and the Joads, see John Keasler, “TV Synopsis: Unappreciated Art Form,” Palm Beach Post, May 30, 1970.
12.On the Davy Crockett craze, see Steven Watts, The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 313–22, esp. 318, 320–21. While the six-foot-five Parker was called handsome and compared to Jimmy Stewart, Buddy Ebsen was dismissed as “greasy and gamey”; see Bosley Crowther, “Screen Disney and the Coonskin Set,” New York Times, May 26, 1955. For Parker’s “aw-shucks school
of acting” like Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart, see “Meet Fess Parker,” St. Petersburg Times, December 24, 1954. For photograph of LBJ and Fess Parker, see “Davy Crockett and Old Betsey,” [Santa Ana, CA] Register, April 1, 1955.
13.Harkins, “The Hillbilly in the Living Room,” 100–101, 114; and Paul Harvey, “The Beverly Hillbillies,” Lewiston [ME] Evening Journal, October 26, 1968; the same article by the syndicated columnist circulated in the South. For a synopsis of Barney’s failure in the big city, see “Reunion to Bring Barney Fife Back,” New York Times, November 20, 1965.
14.Hal Humphrey, “Viewing Television: Theory of the ‘Hillbillies,’” [New Orleans] Times-Picayune, January 13, 1963. Another critic saw the stories of the top ten television shows as relying on the “rube” versus the “city slicker,” or the older cracker motif of the beau versus the backwoodsman. He called The Beverly Hillbillies “vigorous vulgarians,” the characters in The Andy Griffith Show “oafs,” and Gomer Pyle a “slob.” See Arnold Hano, “TV’s Topmost—This Is America?,” New York Times, December 26, 1965.
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