The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society [Book Review]

Abstract

Henceforth please disregard those glossy New Yorker ads touting Atlanta's cosmopolitanism, Nashville's culture, Dallas's night life. According to this reanalysis of 1938-1968 survey data from Gallup and the National Opinion Research Center (first published in 1972 and now issued in paperback), the South is still as particularistic, pistol-happy, and puritanical as ever. After ingeniously employing surveys to demarcate the South from the rest of the U.S., sociologist John Shelton Reed compares opinion in the two regions on three broad topics: regional loyalties and kinship ties, violence, and religion. Interstate highways, condominiums, and New York-produced TV programs have apparently had little impact on Southern localism. Corporal punishment and permit-free gun ownership still command considerably more support to the south than to the north of the "Smith and Wesson line." Fundamentalist Protestantism, with its corollaries of prohibitionism and antipathy to Catholics, Jews, and atheists remains much more pervasive in Dixie than outside it. Nor are these contrasts much reduced when statistically controlled for the survey respondents' education, urbanization, and occupations. Southern values, according to Reed, are more than products of the region's obvious demographic traits; there really is something different about the South.

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