AHR Forum

On Observing the Quicksand

MICHAEL O'BRIEN

Forty or so years ago, "the regional historian [was] likely to be oppressed by a sense of his unimportance" and to believe his moment was passing before the pressure of sweeping nationalisms.1 Feeling unimportant is something of a character trait for Southerners in American culture, but this pessimism proved not to be prescient, although the vitality of the regionalist idea has remained conflicted and uneven. Of late, historians of the American West have grown more interested in the idea, and the Midwesterners show signs of life, but the New Englanders are mostly indifferent, and those in the "Middle States" long since gave up the ghost. As usual, the Southerners have been most eager, most endowed with regional organizations, study centers, periodicals, publishers, tourist pilgrimages, and bric-à-brac. Indeed, the South seems often to be looked to by other regions as a model of how to invent and sustain an identity, when the Western by comparison seems diffuse and the Midwestern etiolated.2 So a historian of the American South comes to these articles on European and Asian regionalism with mixed feelings, greatly pleased to see such intelligent synthesis, but mildly puzzled at the notion that all this is news. In Mississippi, regionalism is not "a less-than-familiar perspective."	1
Professor Applegate skillfully rehearses the multifarious ways in which regionalism can be understood. Many echo how Southern history has been configured. Seeing locality as a safely subsidiary form of nationalism was the meaning of Henry Grady's "New South" and the "local-color" school of the late nineteenth century, while Howard Odum and his disciples around the 1930s published big, fat books on American and Southern regionalisms. Earlier, there had been Southerners, such as John C. Calhoun, who spoke of "Southern rights" but were Unionist, and who thought localism to be an underpinning of a federal nationality. There had been others, secessionists such as Jefferson Davis, who concluded that American nationalism had failed and who grounded a new state on a different landscape of localities. Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address described the South as the site of the reactionary and counter-revolutionary, and many Southerners have thought him right and watched their neighbors for the un-American thing. That national politics is an aggregation of particularist politics was something James Madison knew and V. O. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation argued in 1949. C. Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951) contended that the South became a colonial economy of the North. William Faulkner grasped the problem of "multiplicity and fragmentation," and there is a whole literature on "the idea of the South," which might be described as "constructivist." Placing the South in the story of modernization has been going on for thirty years or more, as have books on the invention of nationality, tradition, and region, mostly before Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Southerners have even had the concept of the "post-Southern" for about twenty years, and they begin to have an intimation of a connection between regionalism and multiculturalism. Black Southerners and white Southerners, in their differing but interconnected ways, know a little of regionality as victimhood, the latter having buried their dead at Shiloh, the former having cut down their strange fruit. As to the tension between professionalized scholars and local erudites, most Southernists have a file of letters from vigilant women in Vicksburg and annoyed men in Alabama, who are not slow to correct one's misunderstandings of General Sherman or Great-great-uncle Beauregard.3	2
So it is tempting to say that Southerners have been there, done that, and got lots of T-shirts, with images of Monticello, Appalachian springs, Robert Johnson, the Stars and Bars, and Delta weddings. In fact, they might be slightly dismayed to discover how trendy Southern understandings might be. They have found it energizing to be out of step; the opportunities for indignation are so many, remembering that regions die without a certain quota of misanthropy about the opinions held of them somewhere else. Indeed, this Southern habit of mind is now so old that it may be drifting into senescence. If Applegate is right that regionalism is all the rage in Europe (and I think her only half-right), it is a little tired in the American South, and the intellectual conviction of its pertinence is probably weaker now than a half-century ago; it may have become more subtle, analytically more sophisticated, but this may be the Owl of Minerva at dusk. My own recent experience is that it is hard to persuade people that region is a profitable way to structure American history, when race, class, and gender compete as useful categories of analysis, more firmly lodged in minds. Not unexpectedly, we do not now have Southern history, so much as we have (for example) women's history that happens to be located in the South. Identities have to be alert to survive.	3
One thing a Southern historian has learned is that, if one moves "region" from the realm of "objective" reality to what Professor Wigen calls the "subjective expressions of regional belonging," one has to give perception a history. It helps to interrogate how the idea of "region" has evolved.4 As both authors suggest, it is a vague and flexible term, but its commodiousness runs deep. The word, after all, arises from the Latin regere, to rule, and early came to mean a place capable of being governed. But almost anything can be governed, from a cow to an empire. So "region" did not necessarily mean a political domain, and size was irrelevant, as it often was in pre-modern usages; a "continent" might once have meant something large like Asia but also something tiny, a spit of land. But bodies, too, had regions (arms, kidneys, the seats of humors), and so did the unearthly. John Milton's Satan asks in the Hall of Pandemonium, "Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime . . . That we must change for Heav'n[?]"5	4
All this persists until very late. If anything, the word tended to become vaguer, the further it drifted from its Latin root. One can see this in American usage in the nineteenth century, including that of the South. Thomas Dew, president of the College of William and Mary, wrote in 1841, "Perhaps the most royal road to woman's heart is through the region of the intellect."6 Striking is that, of the many usages of the word, the scarcest is the one deployed in these essays. Historians casually refer to the South as a "region" before the Civil War, but the term is anachronistic and was not then deployed by Southerners to describe the whole South. It meant something smaller, the Piney Woods or the Blue Ridge Mountains or the city of Charleston. So George Frederick Holmes in 1849 spoke of "the tide-water region of Virginia," as we still might.7 This usage was relational but had little implication of dependence; one might have regions without a whole, and parts might relate without one having sovereignty. With no core, there is no periphery. It had been the hope of the American political experiment to achieve union without centralization, and most antebellum Southerners understood the United States precisely as a collectivity of parts in which none, especially not the federal government, was dominant, but all were freely cooperative. It was the death of this political idea in the Civil War that made it possible to describe the South as a "region," for it reconfigured the United States as a nation-state, with subsidiary divisions. But even in the late nineteenth century, the usage of "region" was uncommon and did not become usual until after World War I.8	5
This chronology seems to accord with, at least, British usage. By imitation from the French, "regionalism" begins to appear in the 1880s, though infrequently and (as the Edinburgh Review put it) "inharmoniously." The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first reference to Applegate's primary meaning of region—"a relatively large subdivision of a country for economic, administrative or cultural purposes that frequently implies an alternative system to centralized organization"—in The Future of Local Government by G. D. H. Cole, the English socialist, in 1921.9 Planning was important here; countries needed scientific management, and regions were rational units of governance, clever mediations between what a sensible planner might want and the inconvenient atavisms of awkward Bretons, Catalans, or Georgians. Howard Odum and Harry Estill Moore wrote in American Regionalism (1938) of "the new science of the region" and of "practical planning."10 But one could not have this sense of region until after the consolidation of the nation-state, which was the long work of the nineteenth century, continued in our own day. Nor could one have that other sense of region, which is relevant to its Asian usage, as a geographical aggregation of nations within a world system. Region came to radiate from the nation, upward and downward.11	6
All this suggests a caution. Applegate confines herself to the period after 1945, by which time "regions" and "regionalism" had become accepted, if disputed, categories. Yet many of her historical actors refuse the label, even now. Very few Scots would accept a description of Scotland as a "region," including those who do not vote for the Scottish Nationalist Party. I am half-Scottish and would not, perhaps the more so as the other half is Cornish and remembers not only Culloden but also the rebellion of 1497, when the English and Henry VII defeated a Cornish army on Blackheath. (True, I had to look up the date, but grievances are the more forceful for being vague.) Wigen's essay rightly speaks of very old historical identities in Asia, hard to fit into these newfangled categories, but it is scarcely less so in Europe. The trouble is that continuities are so mixed with instabilities, not especially but markedly in our own times. New nations appear only to disappear, enclaves raise flags, bombs explode. Asia has changed immensely in the last several generations; in Tibet, India, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the lineaments of political identities have shifted, and nationality itself has been invented. In Europe, the Soviet Union has come and gone, Italy develops fissures, the Balkans struggle into uncertain forms, the map of Central and Eastern Europe is almost unrecognizable from what it was a generation ago. Even in Britain, that Burkean place, it becomes doubtful that the United Kingdom will remain united for much longer; Ulster's fate is uncertain, a Scottish parliament has reappeared, and the English do not know who they are; newspapers publish subtle articles about the legality of secession, just like in Canada, just like once in South Carolina.12 Meanwhile, the European Union reconfigures itself with complicated and little-understood swiftness and, at the very least, seems to have rendered the idea of national sovereignty moot, without quite establishing a greater European federal nationality, although its possibility tends to sanction conjectural talk of European parts as "regions."	7
Applegate and Wigen, of course, know all this, better than I do. Yet their analyses quieten it all, because the language of regionalism is a language of stability and limited volatilities. Those who use it tend to be saying, "Yes, we belong one to another, we connect, but let's discuss the terms of belonging." They admirably deal in the nuances of stability, what have been or ought to be the relationships between core and periphery, the nation-state and its regions, the strong and the weak, but they presume that there should be or has been a reciprocal relationship. Applegate more than Wigen flings this presumption into the far past, into times when the modern word "regionalism" would have been meaningless to those then living. Her tone is mildly irritated or amused with those who seek to upset matters. She smiles at "a thicket of Basques, Slovenes" etc., and frowns at "murderous separatist movements." But as we know, one man or woman's political murder is another's act of patriotism. Applegate is for the big picture and wants to "productively stabilize our perceptions of European history," which is hard to do, when the damn people keep rearranging Europe and do not agree on its structure, when their perceptions are unstable, quicksilver. She wants us to think big, when all the regionalists want to think small. There is a dissonance.	8
Perhaps part of the problem is that writing from within American culture about Europe and Asia tends to suggest a stabler world than anyone in Belfast, Split, Lhasa, Seoul, or St. Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad/St. Petersburg might be experiencing. The United States is one of the few places in the world where the nation-state seems incontestable. Hardly anywhere else on the planet has a polity over 200 years old and boundaries stable for more than a century. And this attitude is present, despite the fact that only about a third of the states of the U.S. are there by free consent. Perhaps one day, the Chicanos will want to expel the Americans from the lands seized from Mexico in the 1840s or the Inuits may rise up to claim the Alaska bought without their consent, just as Louisiana was purchased. There are, to be sure, fringe groups who want a Southern nation and do "not hesitate to advocate secession and self-rule for the Southern states."13 At Civil War battle reenactments, there are booths that sell charming little images of Lincoln with a red bullethole in his forehead, on which are emblazoned the ancient slogan, "Sic Semper Tyrannis." But, on the whole, the American republic has managed to turn empire into a stable, consensual polity. So, in the United States, region accepts the permanence of the nation-state, although even here the strength of regionalism is roughly in proportion to a history of a problematic relationship to the federal government. Hence this is, perhaps, a good place to conceptualize regionalism, but a poor place from which to imagine what region might mean elsewhere. Indeed, I suspect that the new availability of the language of regionalism in Europe and Asia may be partly due to the cultural influence of the United States, whose political language is now so broadly available and serves to reinforce the regionalist concept at the same moment that it has validated the efficiency of supermarkets. Applegate and Wigen are certainly discerning an indigenous movement in foreign cultures, but they may also be listening to an echo of American ideology.14 For Americans seem to stand on solid ground, but most people in the world write about these matters as the quicksand approaches, recedes, or closes about them.	9
Michael O'Brien is Phillip R. Shriver Professor of History at Miami University (Ohio) and, concurrently, the Senior Mellon Scholar in American History at the University of Cambridge. He has written extensively on the intellectual history of the American South: his books include The Idea of the American South, 1920–1941 (1979), A Character of Hugh Legaré (1985), and Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (1988). O'Brien writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement. Notes 1 "The Irony of Southern History" (1952), in C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History, rev. edn. (Baton Rouge, La., 1968), 187. 2 For a brief overview, see Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, and Peter S. Onuf, All over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore, Md., 1996). 3 Documenting all these standpoints would amount to a bibliography of modern Southern historical literature, but, by way of illustration, see, on Grady and local color, Wayne Mixon, Southern Writers and the New South Movement, 1865–1913 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980); on Odum, as well as a Southern "constructivism," Michael O'Brien, The Idea of the American South, 1920–1941 (Baltimore, Md., 1979); on Calhoun, Irving H. Bartlett, John C. Calhoun: A Biography (New York, 1993); on Davis and nationalism, Paul D. Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge, La., 1978); on Lincoln, Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York, 1992); on Madison, Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995); on Key, Milton C. Cummings, ed., V. O. Key, Jr., and the Study of American Politics (Washington, D.C., 1988); on internal colonialism, Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York, 1986); on Faulkner, Daniel J. Singal, William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist (Chapel Hill, 1997); on modernization, Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 (Baton Rouge, 1987); on inventing the South, Frank E. Vandiver, ed., The Idea of the South: Pursuit of a Central Theme (Chicago, 1964); on the postmodern, Lewis P. Simpson, "The Closure of History in a Postsouthern America," in The Brazen Face of History: Studies in the Literary Consciousness in America (Baton Rouge, 1980), 255–76; on multiculturalism, William L. Andrews, Minrose C. Gwin, Trudier Harris, and Fred Hobson, eds., The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (New York, 1998). 4 I confine myself to its usage in the English and American languages, even though clearly there are formidable problems in dealing, as these essays do, with other cultures, whose languages use other words to describe what is here translated into "region" and so necessarily mean different things. 5 John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1, lines 242–44. 6 Thomas R. Dew to B. Franklin Dew, May 10, 1841, Dew Family MSS, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. 7 George Frederick Holmes to William Campbell Preston, March 6, 1849, Preston Family Papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Virginia. 8 It is my impression that it was much used by newly national businesses, to categorize their divisional organizations. But also significant were the various scientific disciplines such as geology, which were concerned to map the American landscape; the U.S. Geological Survey divided the country into regions. 9 The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d edn. (Oxford, 1989), 18: 510–12. 10 Howard W. Odum and Harry Estill Moore, American Regionalism: A Cultural-Historical Approach to National Integration (1938; rpt. edn., Gloucester, Mass., 1966), 3. 11 The invention of the region, in turn, mandated the invention of the "subregional." On this, see Michael O'Brien, "Finding the Outfield: Subregionalism and the American South," Historical Journal 38 (December 1995): 1047–56. 12 See, for example, "England, Whose England: It May Not Come Naturally, But Devolution Is Going to Force The English to Come to Terms with a Nebulous Sense of Identity," Financial Times (September 30, 1998): 14. 13 Michael Hill, "The Southern League Mission Statement," which can be read at the web site of the Southern League of Georgia at http://www.mindspring.com/|SCslga/index.html. 14 A recent American article about England, for example, speaks of "the other regions that make up Britain—Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland": Warren Hoge, "Has England Lost Its Identity? Or Just Its Clichés?" New York Times (October 14, 1998): A4. The Financial Times article cited above, however, nowhere applies the words "region" or "regionalism" to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—it speaks of "the smaller parts of the UK"—but only to a conjectural administrative division of England into "regions whose dimensions no one can agree upon."

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