"What I’m still groping for is solid empirical confirmation that the Southernification of white rural America did happen and, if so, how it happened."
Religion couldn't be the only way, but how could it not be one of the ways? Many rural people aren't regular churchgoers, but they've got a church they're not going to. And Evangelical and megachurch culture (not exactly the same thing, but lots of overlap) is pretty Southern. Southern Baptists are *definitely* Southern — *and* thought of as more "orthodox" for being more conservative, *and* the denomination's "conservative" reputation seems to come, in part, from its segregationist past.
Yankee religion seemed to prize steadiness over revival: go to church regularly; you don't need to have a "born-again" story about how you got saved. Southern religion seems to have been less about regular attendance, more about sporadic revivals. It's less bougie, more suitable for people with unsteady lives. As churchgoing becomes less normal overall, perhaps it's easier for everyone, including those with otherwise-regular lives, to slip into sporadic attendance and an unchurched conflation of faith with other identity-oriented sentiments, like patriotism.
The South has a reputation for being "Christ-haunted" in a way that the North does not, and it's not all Flannery O'Connor's fault:
My first sustained encounter with Evangelicals was on an Ivy-League campus. No surprise many of them *came* from the South. But I'm not sure where so many of them came from explains the shared unspoken sense that contemporary American Christianity becomes "more Christian" by becoming "more Southern". Immigrant students seemed to believe it, too.
Kate Bowler, associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke, has mapped out megachurch influence before. She might know something about its homogenizing effects. (She definitely knows about prosperity-gospel effects!) She might be a good (and good-humored) brain to pick on what role contemporary Christian culture plays in "Southernizing" all of rural America. I'm less familiar with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and I haven't yet read her book, "Jesus and John Wayne", but her work might be another lead.
In my youth, in rural interior New England (if one draws a line from New York to Portland, Maine, that pretty well defines interior vs. coastal New England), I went through a phase of reading a lot of Lewis Grizzard books. I recall in one of them it being noted that White Southerners have the largely unique experience in America of Losing a War, and so much of what's left of that culture is residual resentment if not shame for that fact. I remember mentioning that to my stepfather, who is a Vietnam veteran, and him saying that anybody who fought in Nam also Lost a War.
The existence of a Lost Cause mythology that rationalizes Losing a War is appealing to those who view themselves as losing a war, even if they don't agree with the particular Cause.
How about this? Successful political movements are seductive. The Republicans COURTED rural whites with flattery ("You're the patriotic, God-fearing, hard-working Salt of the Earth - unlike those liberal elites and welfare cheats...") while Democrats ignored, ridiculed or denounced them as "racist." Guess who scored?
This is really interesting commentary on the homogenization of the rural. In recent years there's been a lot of talk of the homogenization of the urban (for instance, see everything about the "airspace" aesthetic: https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification). I've usually reacted to this talk by noting that this maybe concerns 0.5% of the land area, and 5% of the population (though the majority of the media commentariat), and that in any case, there's still a huge divide between the urban areas and the rural areas around any city, on top of the thought, "how homogeneous can it really be if it's about Japanese-Scandinavian fusion coffee bars next to Korean taco trucks?"
But now you point out there is this parallel trend of homogenization of the rural, and for many decades people have commented on the homogenization of the suburban. It seems that one major trend over the past several decades is that, while there used to be variance between regions driven by physical distance, the variance between "regions" is now entirely driven by distance from the air travel or media nexuses of the cities.
I think southernization of the rural is probably one part of what's going on, but I think it might be worth looking into whether there are other rural regionalisms that have spread as well. Just as the contemporary urban is now an amalgam of foods and musics and arts from Japan, Scandinavia, Mexico, USA, India, etc., so that Austin, Portland, Berlin, Tokyo have blocks with the same set of aesthetics, it would be interesting if the contemporary rural is also a continental (or global?) mishmash. It just so happens that the south had the biggest rural populations, and the most distinctive rural symbols, of the different regions of the country, so it may have the biggest influence on the resulting amalgam. But at least the pickup truck strikes me as historically more western than southern, and maybe a more detailed cultural observer than I might notice some other bits.
Your comment is very interesting - but I have to pick a small point -- I'm pretty sure that the north has pretty consistently more dense rural population than the South -- even if it had a lower rural to urban population ratio -- traditionally the most densely packed rural areas were the highly fertile (and conducive to staple crops in particular) parts of the midwest from Ohio to Nebraska. If anything purely based off of population I think you have have expected midwestern farm culture to become the new default rural culture, not Southern culture.
Good point. That suggests that maybe there is something distinctive about southern rural culture that led it to dominate over places with larger numbers. Though I’d want to see more about those actual numbers.
I suppose one hypothesis about why southern rural culture became the rural culture is that the regional rivalry between the south and New England often focused on the rural vs township divide. If rural areas in the Midwest felt closer culturally to their cities, then they might not have had as strongly distinctive a rural culture.
But I’m an outsider to this and am likely missing some important cultural features.
If you had to pick an iconic vehicle for a White Southerner, it wouldn't be a pickup truck, but a muscle car or hot rod (perhaps even one for running moonshine).
The irony being that Dodge literally just took their existing engine that had nothing to do with the Hemis of yore and decided to brand it as a Hemi in order to make this ad.
Boy, I'm excited to read this Ted Turner hypothesis. Of course, ironically enough Ted Turner himself is very much not conservative but I guess that is not very consequential to this thesis.
However Will -- I think I have even an earlier case study that I think you should earnestly consider -- "Southern Rock" including specifically Lynyrd Skynyrd of course but also Charlie Daniels and whatnot. Decades before the the 90's Braves dynasty, Lynyrd Skynyrd were hitting notes of the proto culture war, and of course their concerts may be some of the earliest places you could spot the stars and bars in less southerly states. I'm not sure exactly how this all fits into your thesis, particularly without reading it yet, but it seems not insignificant to me.
Allman Brothers too. I can confirm that Southern rock was *very* popular in rural Iowa when I was a teenager in the '70s (before Will's time ; ) ). And shortly after, there was "The Dukes of Hazzard" on TV. I think you're very much on to something.
I wonder how much the evolution has been the top-down result of hardcore and influential "true believers" versus a more grassroots bottom-up movement that politicians increasingly had to pander to.
To the extent that it was the former, after 9/11 I know there were various anti-Muslim groups that actively campaigned around the country, lecturing at community centers and town halls. Some of these folks ran for office, while others infiltrated and transformed conservative think tanks into nakedly ideology-driven political organizations.
On the grassroots side, this is a fairly tired take, but I am acquainted with plenty of white people, ostensibly Christians, who have become increasingly uncomfortable with the growth of multicultural America. In short, they hold beliefs that have become taboo. Trump made them feel "seen" for exactly this, as persecuted victims, which was clearly a catalyst for them to coalesce.
And then of course there were plenty of forces that added fuel and also transcend regions by their very nature and drive homogeneity. The Kochs and their ilk exploited these currents politically, and right wing media exploited them commercially.
It's complicated... In its very early days, in the early days of recorded music, it was essentially a grab bag term that covered many traditional styles of music, with much of it coming out of greater appalachia and much of it coming from cowboy ballads out west. Obviously, some of these regions can certainly be considered peripherally southern. But that's just the beginnings -- the Nashville scene started in the 50's and eventually over time became the dominant strain... But *why* Nashville became the country capital and not, say, somewhere in Texas (where *tons* of early country styles and stars came from) is a good question -- but probably had lasting impact on the dominant culture of the music.
I would guess the Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts, which began in 1925 on Nashville's WSM, had something to do with that. WSM acquired a 50,000-watt transmitter in 1932, so their signal was able to reach a vast listenership.
That doesn't explain it within itself -- there was a similar homonogenization and southernification *within* County and Western music. Hell, even the name alludes to it -- it is "Western" after all not "Southern". And yet all of these distinct regional styles -- from Appalachian Virginia to West Texas -- somehow all got flattened into one Nashville based industry.
Much of modern pop country is just lionizing the South, and then listing things we like to do and consume here. Makes it easier for somebody in rural Iowa to pretend they're *really* more like us. How many middle class teens dyed their hair black after they listened to The Downward Spiral ? (I did!)
Just as an aside, I remember in 2007 meeting a guy from Arkansas who was attending the same (Minnesotan) law school as I, and he commented that he couldn't believe how people up here not only listened to southern-style C&W but also even spoke with a slight Southern twang. He was kind of outraged at how artificial this apparent identification with Southern culture was.
All of which is to say that the trend has been going on for a while.
I don't remember exactly where I heard this theory before. But after WWII, as media companies began to grow, they needed to create content that would maximize viewership (and advertisement revenue).
This was a challenge for the mostly White American demographic (African Americans, by vice of discrimination had a much more cohesive community experience) because that community still varied considerably by state and region, and even within regions (like the Northeast) there could be considerable variation between older and newer European immigrant groups.
However, the Southern States (in no small part because of their previous political identity as the Confederacy) had a more cohesive identity and a large population. It was one the content creators could build off of. The Dukes of Hazzard was a great choice - take Deep South culture and remove the ugliest bits and it would be something a broader swath of the country could relate to. Country music, Nascar, barbecue would all follow.
Definitely not my theory, but when I heard it, it made intuitive sense to this Texan.
"Whuppin’ his siblings might have been a natural prelude to Confederate sympathies and noose-collecting if Allen had grown up in, say, a shack in Alabama. But what is most puzzling about Allen’s interest in the old Confederacy is that he didn’t grow up in the South. Like a military brat, Allen hopscotched around the country on a route set by his father’s coaching career. The son was born in Whittier, California, in 1952 (Whittier College Poets), moved to the suburbs of Chicago for eight years (the Bears), and arrived in Southern California as a teenager (the Rams). In Palos Verdes, an exclusive cliffside community, he lived in a palatial home with sweeping views of downtown Los Angeles and the Santa Monica basin."
Great piece. I’m sure there’s a lot to it. However, though I don’t have a philosophy degree, I’m pretty sure that the statement, “Rural Iowans and Minnesotans sound more like rural Missourians than the reverse,” is logically impossible. 😆
Great column, but the plural of Dollar General is Dollars General, and you can't tell me otherwise.
"What I’m still groping for is solid empirical confirmation that the Southernification of white rural America did happen and, if so, how it happened."
Religion couldn't be the only way, but how could it not be one of the ways? Many rural people aren't regular churchgoers, but they've got a church they're not going to. And Evangelical and megachurch culture (not exactly the same thing, but lots of overlap) is pretty Southern. Southern Baptists are *definitely* Southern — *and* thought of as more "orthodox" for being more conservative, *and* the denomination's "conservative" reputation seems to come, in part, from its segregationist past.
Yankee religion seemed to prize steadiness over revival: go to church regularly; you don't need to have a "born-again" story about how you got saved. Southern religion seems to have been less about regular attendance, more about sporadic revivals. It's less bougie, more suitable for people with unsteady lives. As churchgoing becomes less normal overall, perhaps it's easier for everyone, including those with otherwise-regular lives, to slip into sporadic attendance and an unchurched conflation of faith with other identity-oriented sentiments, like patriotism.
The South has a reputation for being "Christ-haunted" in a way that the North does not, and it's not all Flannery O'Connor's fault:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/443791-whenever-i-m-asked-why-southern-writers-particularly-have-a-penchant
My first sustained encounter with Evangelicals was on an Ivy-League campus. No surprise many of them *came* from the South. But I'm not sure where so many of them came from explains the shared unspoken sense that contemporary American Christianity becomes "more Christian" by becoming "more Southern". Immigrant students seemed to believe it, too.
Kate Bowler, associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke, has mapped out megachurch influence before. She might know something about its homogenizing effects. (She definitely knows about prosperity-gospel effects!) She might be a good (and good-humored) brain to pick on what role contemporary Christian culture plays in "Southernizing" all of rural America. I'm less familiar with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and I haven't yet read her book, "Jesus and John Wayne", but her work might be another lead.
In my youth, in rural interior New England (if one draws a line from New York to Portland, Maine, that pretty well defines interior vs. coastal New England), I went through a phase of reading a lot of Lewis Grizzard books. I recall in one of them it being noted that White Southerners have the largely unique experience in America of Losing a War, and so much of what's left of that culture is residual resentment if not shame for that fact. I remember mentioning that to my stepfather, who is a Vietnam veteran, and him saying that anybody who fought in Nam also Lost a War.
The existence of a Lost Cause mythology that rationalizes Losing a War is appealing to those who view themselves as losing a war, even if they don't agree with the particular Cause.
How about this? Successful political movements are seductive. The Republicans COURTED rural whites with flattery ("You're the patriotic, God-fearing, hard-working Salt of the Earth - unlike those liberal elites and welfare cheats...") while Democrats ignored, ridiculed or denounced them as "racist." Guess who scored?
This is really interesting commentary on the homogenization of the rural. In recent years there's been a lot of talk of the homogenization of the urban (for instance, see everything about the "airspace" aesthetic: https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification). I've usually reacted to this talk by noting that this maybe concerns 0.5% of the land area, and 5% of the population (though the majority of the media commentariat), and that in any case, there's still a huge divide between the urban areas and the rural areas around any city, on top of the thought, "how homogeneous can it really be if it's about Japanese-Scandinavian fusion coffee bars next to Korean taco trucks?"
But now you point out there is this parallel trend of homogenization of the rural, and for many decades people have commented on the homogenization of the suburban. It seems that one major trend over the past several decades is that, while there used to be variance between regions driven by physical distance, the variance between "regions" is now entirely driven by distance from the air travel or media nexuses of the cities.
I think southernization of the rural is probably one part of what's going on, but I think it might be worth looking into whether there are other rural regionalisms that have spread as well. Just as the contemporary urban is now an amalgam of foods and musics and arts from Japan, Scandinavia, Mexico, USA, India, etc., so that Austin, Portland, Berlin, Tokyo have blocks with the same set of aesthetics, it would be interesting if the contemporary rural is also a continental (or global?) mishmash. It just so happens that the south had the biggest rural populations, and the most distinctive rural symbols, of the different regions of the country, so it may have the biggest influence on the resulting amalgam. But at least the pickup truck strikes me as historically more western than southern, and maybe a more detailed cultural observer than I might notice some other bits.
Your comment is very interesting - but I have to pick a small point -- I'm pretty sure that the north has pretty consistently more dense rural population than the South -- even if it had a lower rural to urban population ratio -- traditionally the most densely packed rural areas were the highly fertile (and conducive to staple crops in particular) parts of the midwest from Ohio to Nebraska. If anything purely based off of population I think you have have expected midwestern farm culture to become the new default rural culture, not Southern culture.
Good point. That suggests that maybe there is something distinctive about southern rural culture that led it to dominate over places with larger numbers. Though I’d want to see more about those actual numbers.
I suppose one hypothesis about why southern rural culture became the rural culture is that the regional rivalry between the south and New England often focused on the rural vs township divide. If rural areas in the Midwest felt closer culturally to their cities, then they might not have had as strongly distinctive a rural culture.
But I’m an outsider to this and am likely missing some important cultural features.
If you had to pick an iconic vehicle for a White Southerner, it wouldn't be a pickup truck, but a muscle car or hot rod (perhaps even one for running moonshine).
Which makes this from 2002-03 (!!!!!!!!!) an important cultural artifact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gV7fXH45FA
(Seriously you could probably stretch a grad school paper out of this)
If The Beach Boys had appeared today, I think they would be regarded as “bro-country” rather than rock.
Yes -- Dukes of hazard seems so odd for so many reasons now -- some good old boys, sticking it to the law and driving a muscle car.
The irony being that Dodge literally just took their existing engine that had nothing to do with the Hemis of yore and decided to brand it as a Hemi in order to make this ad.
Boy, I'm excited to read this Ted Turner hypothesis. Of course, ironically enough Ted Turner himself is very much not conservative but I guess that is not very consequential to this thesis.
However Will -- I think I have even an earlier case study that I think you should earnestly consider -- "Southern Rock" including specifically Lynyrd Skynyrd of course but also Charlie Daniels and whatnot. Decades before the the 90's Braves dynasty, Lynyrd Skynyrd were hitting notes of the proto culture war, and of course their concerts may be some of the earliest places you could spot the stars and bars in less southerly states. I'm not sure exactly how this all fits into your thesis, particularly without reading it yet, but it seems not insignificant to me.
Allman Brothers too. I can confirm that Southern rock was *very* popular in rural Iowa when I was a teenager in the '70s (before Will's time ; ) ). And shortly after, there was "The Dukes of Hazzard" on TV. I think you're very much on to something.
I wonder how much the evolution has been the top-down result of hardcore and influential "true believers" versus a more grassroots bottom-up movement that politicians increasingly had to pander to.
To the extent that it was the former, after 9/11 I know there were various anti-Muslim groups that actively campaigned around the country, lecturing at community centers and town halls. Some of these folks ran for office, while others infiltrated and transformed conservative think tanks into nakedly ideology-driven political organizations.
On the grassroots side, this is a fairly tired take, but I am acquainted with plenty of white people, ostensibly Christians, who have become increasingly uncomfortable with the growth of multicultural America. In short, they hold beliefs that have become taboo. Trump made them feel "seen" for exactly this, as persecuted victims, which was clearly a catalyst for them to coalesce.
And then of course there were plenty of forces that added fuel and also transcend regions by their very nature and drive homogeneity. The Kochs and their ilk exploited these currents politically, and right wing media exploited them commercially.
It’s the country music culture. That culture has assimilated all of Rural America now.
Was country music historically southern? I thought it was historically called “country/western”, but I don’t know exactly what that label denotes.
It's complicated... In its very early days, in the early days of recorded music, it was essentially a grab bag term that covered many traditional styles of music, with much of it coming out of greater appalachia and much of it coming from cowboy ballads out west. Obviously, some of these regions can certainly be considered peripherally southern. But that's just the beginnings -- the Nashville scene started in the 50's and eventually over time became the dominant strain... But *why* Nashville became the country capital and not, say, somewhere in Texas (where *tons* of early country styles and stars came from) is a good question -- but probably had lasting impact on the dominant culture of the music.
I would guess the Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts, which began in 1925 on Nashville's WSM, had something to do with that. WSM acquired a 50,000-watt transmitter in 1932, so their signal was able to reach a vast listenership.
It was mostly southern, but it used to include cowboy music.
Country and Western music?
That doesn't explain it within itself -- there was a similar homonogenization and southernification *within* County and Western music. Hell, even the name alludes to it -- it is "Western" after all not "Southern". And yet all of these distinct regional styles -- from Appalachian Virginia to West Texas -- somehow all got flattened into one Nashville based industry.
Much of modern pop country is just lionizing the South, and then listing things we like to do and consume here. Makes it easier for somebody in rural Iowa to pretend they're *really* more like us. How many middle class teens dyed their hair black after they listened to The Downward Spiral ? (I did!)
I mean, there's a reason I write my country songs under the name "Greg Rural"
Just as an aside, I remember in 2007 meeting a guy from Arkansas who was attending the same (Minnesotan) law school as I, and he commented that he couldn't believe how people up here not only listened to southern-style C&W but also even spoke with a slight Southern twang. He was kind of outraged at how artificial this apparent identification with Southern culture was.
All of which is to say that the trend has been going on for a while.
Dukes of Hazzard.
I don't remember exactly where I heard this theory before. But after WWII, as media companies began to grow, they needed to create content that would maximize viewership (and advertisement revenue).
This was a challenge for the mostly White American demographic (African Americans, by vice of discrimination had a much more cohesive community experience) because that community still varied considerably by state and region, and even within regions (like the Northeast) there could be considerable variation between older and newer European immigrant groups.
However, the Southern States (in no small part because of their previous political identity as the Confederacy) had a more cohesive identity and a large population. It was one the content creators could build off of. The Dukes of Hazzard was a great choice - take Deep South culture and remove the ugliest bits and it would be something a broader swath of the country could relate to. Country music, Nascar, barbecue would all follow.
Definitely not my theory, but when I heard it, it made intuitive sense to this Texan.
I think just a few decades earlier Bugs Bunny represented a kind of “American Everyman”, but had a Brooklyn accent. It’s interesting how that changed.
You might be interested in this take on "Southern White" as an ethnicity. The discussion thread includes some points about the way this has spread into rural areas well beyond the Old Confederacy https://crookedtimber.org/2012/11/16/southern-white-as-an-ethnicity/
I remember pondering some of these same questions back in 2006: https://newrepublic.com/article/65427/george-allens-race-problem
"Whuppin’ his siblings might have been a natural prelude to Confederate sympathies and noose-collecting if Allen had grown up in, say, a shack in Alabama. But what is most puzzling about Allen’s interest in the old Confederacy is that he didn’t grow up in the South. Like a military brat, Allen hopscotched around the country on a route set by his father’s coaching career. The son was born in Whittier, California, in 1952 (Whittier College Poets), moved to the suburbs of Chicago for eight years (the Bears), and arrived in Southern California as a teenager (the Rams). In Palos Verdes, an exclusive cliffside community, he lived in a palatial home with sweeping views of downtown Los Angeles and the Santa Monica basin."
MidgeAug 31
"What I’m still groping for is solid empirical confirmation that the Southernification of white rural America did happen ..."
Would foodways be a source of data to confirm? For example, the spread of fried chicken and biscuits and gravy ...
Great piece. I’m sure there’s a lot to it. However, though I don’t have a philosophy degree, I’m pretty sure that the statement, “Rural Iowans and Minnesotans sound more like rural Missourians than the reverse,” is logically impossible. 😆