Instant Grits and Plastic Wrapped Crackers: Southern Culture and Regional Development

This essay was originally published in Louis D. Rubin, Jr., The American South: Portrait of a Culture, 1979, 27-37.

In 1928, an unusually far-sighted southerner named Broadus Mitchell pondered the implications of the South’s impending modernization, wondering “whether these great industrial developments [to come] will banish the personality of the South … or whether the old spirit will actuate the new performance.”

“Will industrialism produce the same effects here as elsewhere,” he mused, “or will it submit to be modified by a persistent Southern temperament?” A half century later, the South has certainly seen its share of industrialization, urbanization, and all the other -actions that sociologists call development and most of us would optimistically call progress, but the answers to Mitchell’s questions are still not clear.

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